Would you believe me if I said it was possible to keep the daily amount of time spent on effective social media engagement under 10 minutes? If you’re anything like me, you probably feel skeptical. After all, in order to see real results, you gotta slave away and put in the time, right?
Wrong! You just need to use the right tools and focus your efforts on the most important aspects while automating your social media strategy, using the LinkedIn outreach automation platform and similar tools. The handy infographic below outlines platforms and frequencies at which you should ideally be posting daily.
Source: Lousie Meyer’s Visual Social Media
I know it appears to be daunting, but armed with the following hacks, you’ll eventually be able to pull it all off with time to spare. So here goes:
Use batch scheduling and rescheduling
First things first, batch scheduling can be a real lifesaver when it comes to limiting the amount of time spent crafting content for social media channels. After pre-planning social media posts by channel or by topic, you’re able to auto-schedule and forget about them.
If you decide to dedicate one day a week to time scheduling and curating content, it’ll free you up to tackle all the other high-volume activities on your plate. And realistically speaking, only 5-10 minutes each day will need to go towards social media check-ins.
In addition to batching, rescheduling evergreen content is another great hack. People tend to miss stuff the first time around, so it never hurts to reshare your witty blog post from a few weeks ago. Honestly, batching and rescheduling are your best friends when it comes to creating new content and reducing the amount needed.
Always be flexible but forward-thinking. Planning it out a week, a month or even a year in advance will keep you and everyone involved focused and on the right track. In terms of actionable next steps, your best bet is to develop an epic annual content calendar and then find the scheduling tool that best suits your business needs.
Tap into the power of social proof and social listening tools
In order to take the best possible care of customers, your business needs to stay ahead of the curve. Cultivating social proof and using social listening tools to gain insights into your industry are a must.
Building trust while harnessing the power of target keywords or phrases are what it’s all about nowadays. So, staying on top of all the complaints, praises, suggestions and chatter surrounding your product and service delivery is paramount to successful marketing campaigns.
Determining the content that gets the most engagement and positive reactions will help you figure out what to create and publish more of in the future. Not to mention that customers will start to feel heard and like their opinions matter.
In order to keep your business image and brand in pristine condition, be sure to consult this list of free social media listening and monitoring tools. No matter the platform, you’re bound to find a winner.
Become a MasterChef with IFTTT automation recipes
If you’re not already IFTTT to make your life easier, it’s high time you started. The acronym stands for “If This, Then That,” and the tool allows you to strategically define actions and outcomes through the use of conditional statements, called applets.
Say goodbye to the days of having to tweet your Instagram posts. Thanks to IFTTT you can set up an applet that automatically triggered to do so for you. The possibilities for harnessing IFTTT to your advantage are seemingly endless. Here are a bunch of the most popular examples.
Get creative with how you cut corners. Your Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, Foursquare, and many other profiles are guaranteed to feel a lot more manageable in no time.
Start creating Twitter lists
In 2018, it was estimated that half a billion tweets were being sent out each day. Talk about volume. It’s no wonder business owners find themselves feeling bogged down by all the trending topics, mentions, DMs, and 280-character rants.
Fortunately, the platform actually has a little-known, built-in mechanism that can help you manage your conversations. It’s lists. To set up, all you have to do is click on your profile picture in the top right corner and select Lists. Then, click on create a new list and get to work crafting lists based on whatever relevant topics you’d like.
For example, you can make a special list around a topic like a web analytics. Just add the people and accounts that coincide with your interests. This will, in turn, allow you to bypass a seemingly unending timeline to dive right into tweets surrounding traffic analysis, market research and whatever else matters most to your brand.
Plus, if you’re not up to the task of curating your own list, there are tons of popular accounts already in existence that might have just the list you’re looking for already set up. The lists section on their profiles is open for all to see and engage with, so take a deep breath, take things one Tweet at a time and while you’re at it, check out this helpful list of Twitter best practices so you optimize all around.
Finally, don’t forget to engage meaningfully
There’s no denying it. Social media automation tools are the bee’s knees, but at the end of the day, you can’t afford to neglect human interaction. I promised earlier on in the article that I could help you keep your social media workload under 10 minutes daily, not do away with it altogether.
By automating and working smart, you make it possible to engage in a more meaningful manner. It makes all the difference if you dedicate those 5-10 minutes set aside daily to follow up on post reactions and respond one on one to followers and prospects alike.
Your social listening and monitoring tools will help in pinpointing, but only you can provide feedback in your authentic voice while also taking steps to address matters. Avoid leaving questions unanswered or worse yet siccing people with programmed one-size-fits-all answers. Be real and reliable in your quest to stay on top of things.
Uwe Dreissigacker is the founder of online invoicing software InvoiceBerry & also offers free invoice templates to businesses. Small businesses and sole traders can create, send and manage their invoices, quotes and credit notes with the tool. In his free time, Uwe travels the world and enjoys experiencing different cultures.
