So, you’ve set up all your social media channels and you’re starting to grow your brand presence online. But keeping up with posting and producing relevant and valuable content is so time-consuming that it’s starting to stress you out. You need some time-saving social media tips for your small business.
Most small business owners know that free time is a myth – you constantly have your fingers in multiple pies. The last thing you need to be worried about is making sure that you have enough content to post on social media and that posts are happening regularly.
With these time–saving social media tips for small businesses, you’ll allow yourself extra time to manage and grow your business and you’ll have your brand online without actually having to be online 24/7. Start by brainstorming some social media marketing ideas, sprinkle with some orderly preparation, and you’ll be on your way to having a streamlined and stress-free social media process.
Put together a content calendar
Set aside a few hours to put together a content calendar for a couple of weeks in advance. Extra points if you manage to create it for an entire month in advance! This way you can plan exactly what is going out on which day of the week and which platform it will be used on. This will alleviate trying to scramble for a post and will take time out of deciding which platform to use it on. By doing this you are also able to plan your posts according to the days of the week, holidays, special dates and so forth. It will also allow you to spot any issues before they arise.
Build a bank
We’re not talking about a monetary institution. In fact, we’re talking about something far more valuable than that! An actual content bank with a whole heap of valuable content from tweets to videos to images to blogs and all ideas that you might have for your social media channels. This way you can dip into it and pull out whatever is useful and relevant when creating your content calendar.
There are loads of free tools out there which able you to create wonderful, attractive content. Platforms such as Canva give you a variety of templates to create your own create eye-catching graphics and videos to add to your content bank.
Along with your content bank, save your most important hashtags in there too! Create a document with fundamental, base hashtags that you will use for all your content when you post. Create different columns with relevant hashtags associated with your content that you can easily pop into your copy when you’re ready to post. This will save you time having to rewrite all your hashtags which is a painstaking task at the best of times.
Talk about being efficient and planning ahead!
Copy that!
Block out an hour or two of your calendar to sit and focus on copy for your posts that are impactful, engaging and informative. If your copy doesn’t match your content, your posts are likely to fall flat. Avoid fumbling around for the right words and rather make sure you’re well prepared to smooth talk your audience into investing in your brand.
Reuse and recycle
You’ve spent hours creating beautiful, engaging content and with just one swift click of a button, all those hours feel wasted on a single post. Nope! Cross post your content over all your channels to avoid the draining task of having to create new content over and over again. If your content is strong, recycle it! You can stretch it into a variety of formats such as videos, images, infographics, or GIF’s to use more than once. Recycling, reusing and cross-posting is one of the best time-saving tips to ensure your powerful content is seen by the right audience at multiple times.
Make use of online tools!
There is an abundance of fantastic online tools out there that you can use to schedule your content well in advance. These tools allow you to select the precise day, time and platform. This can save you countless hours and takes the frustration out of having to stop halfway through a task because you need to post something on Instagram. While some are paid, there are many free ones too. Although the free plans have limited functionally, they get the job done perfectly and allow you to pop something into a post, schedule, sit back and watch your DM’s light up. Some of these tools include Hootsuite, Later, and Sprout Social.
Along with scheduling tools, we also recommend that you use analytics tools to track engagement, reach, audience demographic and size. This will help you save on having to go into the insights of every platform and export the data manually. Not only is this overwhelming, but it’s also a big energy vampire!
For some tips on how to increase your social media engagement read our blog here.
Stay focused
Lastly, stay focused on the task at hand. Be strict with yourself by allocating hours in your calendar to do the above-mentioned tasks and stick to this plan. Get rid of all distractions that may creep up during the content planning process so that “future you“ can sit back and watch your pro-active efficiency play out in the weeks to come. Put your phone away, close all the tabs on your laptop and avoid getting up for that extra, unnecessary cup of coffee. If you commit a little bit of time to properly prepare your social media content, you’ll save yourself an abundance of hours in the long run.
So now that you know what it takes to save time and have a killer social media feed, you can think about all the other things you want to do to build your brand. Remember, there’s no such thing as perfect, so don’t overthink your social media. Just plan ahead, schedule and relax.
“Time is non-refundable, use it with intention.” – unknown
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