7 Simple Ways to Save Time On Social Media Marketing

Does social media marketing take too much of your time?

Social media marketing doesn’t have to be a time suck. Whether you’re active on two social networks or a dozen, it’s possible to simplify your strategy to increase your productivity and save up hours every week, without losing engagement or followers.

With the right tools and a few hacks, you can be well on your way to social media success with less effort than you’re now investing. It’s not magic, it’s just the science of social media efficiency.

Here are 7 strategies that will help you save time on social media marketing.

1. FOCUS ON THE RIGHT PLATFORM

There are hundreds of social networks out there, but not all of them are necessarily good for your purpose. To avoid investing time and money in platforms that bring low returns on investment (ROI), stop a minute and look at the numbers.

You can use built-in analytics provided by social networks, Google Analytics, third-party analytics, or a combination of these. Whichever you use, make sure you look at the data from all angles to determine the lifetime value of customers for every channel.

Once you have the numbers, you can follow this simple 3-step process to identify the platform(s) with the highest ROI.

1. Look at conversion rates across all social channels. You may have thousands of fans on Facebook, but if you’re getting twice as many conversions from the few hundred followers you have on Twitter, that’s where your audience is.
2. Compare conversion rates for every network.
3. Compare costs for every channel to determine how much each conversion is costing you.

This simple approach will help you focus on the one or two social channels that have the best conversion rates and highest ROI.

2. AUTOMATE YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA EFFORTS

Social media management tools can save you hours every day. Many of your competitors are likely using them already, so the sooner you embrace them, the better.

That said, it’s good to consider your options carefully and narrow your selection to a few essential tools, else you may end up paying for overlapping or superfluous features.

Tools used by highly successful social marketers include Hootsuite, Buffer, or Socialoomph. PC MAG has compared some of the best social media management tools here. You may want to try a few first before making a commitment.

3. DEVELOP SYSTEMS FOR CURATING, SCHEDULING, AND REPOSTING CONTENT

Social media marketing can feel slow and onerous if you do everything manually. The best way to streamline your social media efforts is to develop systems that enable you to curate and schedule content. It’s easier than it sounds. You can do it by using free tools and apps.

• With Feedly you can discover and gather content that’s relevant to your audience. Pocket also lets you easily save content you browse online for later use.
• With the IFTTT mobile app you can use a recipe or macro to send articles saved via Pocket straight to a Buffer queue for automatic posting.
• IFTTT has many useful social media recipes designed to make your life easier, like adding images you upload to Instagram to your Buffer queue.
• Most browsers, including Firefox and Chrome, come with social extension that integrate with Pocket, Feedly, and other social media tools you may be using, allowing you to curate and schedule content as you surf the web.

And let’s not forget that not all content gets outdated. Previously posted content that generated many comments, shares, likes, or retweets can be reposted on Twitter, without the risk of annoying anyone. Alternatively, you can republish content you posted on a particular network on other networks, i.e. from Pinterest to Facebook, or from Facebook to LinkedIn. Having a content marketing calendar helps with this.

The trick is not to repost content just for the sake of it, but only when it’s relevant to your marketing message, so that you can blend it in seamlessly with your marketing efforts.

4. SET UP ALERTS TO ENABLE SELECTIVE ENGAGEMENT

Engaging with your following is one of the keys to success on social media, as you probably know only too well. The problem is that engaging with others can take a lot of time, even more than creating content. What’s more, not all interactions are fruitful.

Forget about scrolling through your Facebook and Twitter feeds all the time to monitor discussions which you can join with a piece of sage advice, a link, or a recommendation. There’s a smarter way to engage your audience: set up alerts to get notified when your company’s name or a topic you are interested in gets mentioned.

One simple way to do this is by using Google Alerts, which enables you to monitor the Web, including all social media channels, for interesting new content. Type in your keywords (company name, topic, etc.) and choose sources. You can even narrow down alerts to a specific region, which is great if you want to focus locally.

Notifications will be delivered straight to your email address and you’ll never miss a social media discussion that’s important to you.

5. DO SIMILAR TASKS AT THE SAME TIME

One reason why social media marketing is so time consuming is the constant switching that you have to do between different networks, pages, or actions. Using different mobile apps for different networks further complicates matters. But there’s a simple approach that can minimize needless switching and enhance your focus — batching.

Batching doesn’t require any special tools, and can be applied to almost all of your routine social media actions. Here’s how you can do it:

1. Group similar social media actions together, i.e. creating content, curating content, or following people.
2. Set aside a period of time for creating content. Set another for curating content, following people, and so on.
3. Consider further breaking down actions into sub-actions. If you have three hours a week for content creation, set one hour aside for Twitter content, one hour for Facebook content, etc. Alternatively, you can break down post creation based on post type or category (link to existing blog content, curated content, seasonal promotions, words of wisdom, and so on), devoting to each a set amount of time.

The whole concept of batching is about focusing on one type of social action at a time. It’s the simple solution to eliminating the stress that often comes with switching between one thing and another constantly.

6. SHARE YOUR POSTS ACROSS NETWORKS

If you are active on more than one social platform, you can save time by eliminating the need to manually share posts and links on each of them. Almost all social management apps help you with this, including HootSuite or Buffer, which also has a nifty Chrome plugin for this purpose.

To publish your content on all social networks at the same time, you will first have to log into your different social accounts through your app and link your accounts together. It takes only a few minutes and it’s safe.

A note of caution: consider carefully what you publish where. A Facebook image will look good on Twitter, Pinterest, and almost anywhere else, but a question or short message written for Twitter could look odd on Pinterest, LinkedIn or even Facebook.

7. OUTSOURCE TO SAVE TIME

Outsourcing is the cost-effective alternative to getting help without having to hire social experts full time. Depending on your needs, you can outsource all of your social media marketing, or only a part of it. You can outsource only the management of specific channels, or only the content creation. One of the benefits of outsourcing is that it’s so scalable.

Pause a moment and look at what you are doing now. What part of your social media marketing takes most of your time or is the hardest? A social media marketing agency or expert could handle it for you. In spite of the initial investment you make, the time you save can result in significant long-term savings.

While you can outsource work to freelancers, it’s often safer to opt instead for an agency or team of experts, as that provides more flexibility and is a failsafe approach: should one team member become unavailable, another can take his or her place, and there won’t be any continuity problems.

The Bottom Line

A systematic, automated approach to social media marketing is the most effective way to save time without engaging less with your audience. In fact, this approach gives you more time for focusing on what really matters on social media and beyond. 

After you try the strategies described above, we’d be happy to hear from you to learn how it went. Don’t forget to drop us a comment, will you? Remember, for best results you will want to use a combination of them.

And don’t forget that we’re here to help you use social media as effectively as possible. That means not only achieving your targets, but doing it without having to waste any time with repetitive or recurrent tasks. To find out more, you can always reach us here.

Original Post

Jason Gordon, Founder – Strong Social