Maintaining a social media presence can be a real time burn for you and your business. In this article we provide tips for streamlining your social media activities to enable maximum effectiveness with least effort.
If you’ve spent any time playing around on any of the main social networks (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn), you’d know how easy it is to waste a bunch of hours browsing around and achieving nothing. On the other hand, some businesses simply don’t dedicate any time to their social media efforts, and hence aren’t even giving themselves the opportunity to harvest any of its benefits. Whichever angle you’re coming from, the following tips will assist you to fit social media into your schedule more effectively.
Cut out the noise
It’s easy to get caught up in the torrent of communication happening across the social networks. In order to avoid burning hour upon hours digesting and creating information that’s of no benefit or relevance to you, follow these steps:
- Choose appropriate networks to participate in. There’s no point trying to be active across 50 social networks, particularly if you’re a small operation. Pick out the networks with the most relevant user base to your business and focus on these.
- Learn to scan through content. The ability to quickly pick out content which is relevant and leave the rest will save you a lot of time.
- Only form close relationships with those who deliver value. There’s no point yacking away with people who have zero interest in your offering.
Make your messages count
What do you prefer in friends; someone who reserves the need to speak unless they’ve got something worth saying, or the person who blabbers on and on about nothing? Fair chance it’s the former. Take this mindset when designing messages for social networks. Less is more. There’s plenty of noise on social networks already so don’t feel like you need to add to it, you’re only wasting extra time and possibly turning off your followers by being in their face too much. Make each and every message you send meaningful and your followers will appreciate what you have to say a whole lot more.
Consolidate your posting
If you’re manually switching between networks to post updates and see what’s going on, you’re living in the dark ages. Operating this way is hugely time consuming. You need to be using an application which can combine your various streams in one place, allowing you to post and keep track of what other people are saying from the same dashboard. There are quite a lot of these applications on the market now, and many are free. One of the players who’s been in the game for quite a while and is popular with millions of users around the world is Hootsuite.
Scheduling
If you’ve been using social media for any length of time you’d know the importance of good timing for your posts. Unfortunately, it’s impossible to be available to do posts 24/7, and even if you could be you’d just be wasting a lot of time by always logging in to make posts at certain times. Scheduling posts alleviates this problem, and allows you to send out posts at the best times without having to rush to a computer at a certain time to do so. Once again, Hootsuite is a good solution for this and has quite a good publishing tool which allows you to schedule and keep track of upcoming posts.
Implementing these tips will not only reduce the time you need to spend on social media, it will make the time you do spend on it more effective.
What techniques do you use to streamline your social media efforts?
