Time Management and Social Media Campaigns – Do You Use Your Time Efficiently?

If time is money, then time management is one of the most valuable skills one can possess. Social media represents a brave new world for many small business owners, who will end up spending way more time on certain tasks than they need to. Here are 5 tips to help you use your time more efficiently on social media. If you aren`t taking advantage of most of these then you can have a much more effective and productive experience on social media simply by making some small changes to your routine.

Focus on what`s working best

Most social media sites have some form of data and analytics for you to dig into. This is an important way to spend some time each week. Even if your social footprint is still small, spend some time looking at which of your posts create the most buzz or are bringing the most visitors to your website. By focusing your efforts on what`s working best, you`re gearing up for much better results in the long term.

Plan ahead

Rather than sitting down each and every day and thinking of fresh new content for your social media, deciding what you are going to post and what you`re going to say out of thin air, there`s a much more effective way to do this. Plan things out for your social accounts a few weeks or a month in advance. Sit down one time, and make a list of ideas for your social media updates and you`ll be able to tell a much more cohesive story.

Take advantage of tools

After you have planned ahead and came up with ideas for your social updates for a stretch of time, you can use certain tools to automatically stagger these updates over the course of a few weeks or a month. One of the most popular choices, and one of the easiest to use, is called HootSuite. With HootSuite, you can take all of your ideas and schedule them to go out automatically over time. You can do all the work once, and not have to deal with your social accounts on a daily basis. It`s a lot quicker to just sit down and do it all at once than to go back and forth all month.

Interact, but avoid distractions

You`re only human, and it`s easy to get distracted while you`re working on your social media campaigns. Social media sites are, by design, very distracting. There`s not much advice to give here besides to remind yourself to stay focused. If you see an interesting article or video you want to watch, just copy and paste the link into a document and check them out when you`re done working so you`re not breaking focus every 5 minutes.

Meet your ambassadors

Chances are you will start to notice and recognize certain users on your social media accounts that always interact with things you post, share them, post comments all the time… Get to know these people, introduce yourself, thank them for following you and ask for their feedback and opinions. Your power users are like an army of ambassadors for your brand, and the lifeblood of your social media.

Final thoughts…

Social media is an incredibly powerful tool, and the more effectively you can use it – the faster your efforts will begin to snowball on their own. It takes a strong initial push to build up a following, and you`ve got to be coming up with clever and interesting social media campaigns, but not every campaign needs to be a breakthrough slam dunk. A few likes and followers here, a few shares there – they all start to add up pretty quickly and grow your following, giving you an even stronger platform to launch future content.