Powerful Tips and Tools to Manage Time on Social Media

 

Gone are the days when you needed a huge marketing budget to stay afloat. Social media has opened the doors to reach people with minimum investment. Or has it? With the proliferation of social media platforms and the need to stay relevant in them, the majority of the investment has to be on time. With limited time there is only so much you can do on social media. According to research, 70 % of the users expect a response in 15 minutes. 15 minutes! Even when the volume of conversations is high, you have to find the time to promote, publish, analyze, and execute your social media strategy. Responding to incoming posts is just a part of it. It hence becomes imperative to manage time effectively on social media.

In this article, I have identified actionable ways in which you can manage time on social media. I have also identified a few tools which I’ve used to manage my time effectively.

Choose Which Social Platforms To Be In

Managing time when working on social media is very essential. Investing in multiple social media platforms would be a blunder and would drain your valuable time. It is, therefore, critical to choose the right social media platform so that you remain productive.

The best way to go about choosing the right social media is by checking where your audience resides. To identify this correctly, you need to understand your value proposition first. Your USP would tell which social media platform your target segment prefers. Tailor your content based on that particular social media to gain traction.

Automate Where Possible

Managing multiple social media profiles across platforms is challenging. Publishing content to multiple social media profile becomes a tedious task. That’s where automation helps. The jury is still out on automating social media tasks. I believe tasks like publishing content can be automated to free up time. All this time can be used to interact with your users.

Tools like Buffer, SMhack, Tweetdeck, dlvr.it, etc. are a lifesaver when it comes to freeing up time for social media managers. These social media management tools help in scheduling content across multiple social media profiles so that you don’t have to do it manually. This frees up a lot of time for the human touch in social media. Use this extra time to connect with the users. Find out why they are interacting with your brand, what do they love about it what are their expectations. These interactions would give you valuable insights to grow your brand on social media.

Use Images Consistently

Posts with images get 94% more views than posts without images. Images are of utmost importance when it comes to content marketing. You will be leaving money on the table if you do not identify and use the right images in your social media posts. I know it’s easy for bigger teams to get images from their design team. It’s tough for startups and SMBs to implement that. Fortunately, there are forums from where you can get quality images for free. Use portals like Pexels, FreeImages, and AllTheFreeStock to get those images. Never go image hungry again.

For sharp, high quality, and contextual images you can check out iStock, Shutterstock, and Adobe Stock. If you have the budget to invest, these portals can save a lot of time finding the right images. All these sites have a monthly plan with which they ration out a fixed number of images. Use these to extract more eyeballs towards your content in social media.

Content Mix

Only text-based posts are not going to work in social media. It is important to experiment with different types of content to be effective on social media. Identify which type of content is being received well by your audience and try to maximize it. You need to try with content types like influencer posts, infographics, news, images, blog posts and case studies to check which ones stay. Unfortunately, it is difficult for smaller teams to get this done right.

A few tools can be very helpful here for small teams to get their strategy right with minimal time investment.

Infographic: Canva and Piktochart

These two allow you to create custom images and infographics. This is quite useful to push out content on your own without relying on the design team. When dependencies increase, it takes up more time. These two tools try to make you confident about images as you don’t have to be a skilled artist to publish them. Use the options and start generating impressive images. They have a free version as well as a subscription-based version.

For Influencer articles: Buzzsumo and Feedly

These tools allow you to select the most popular content so that you can dish out only the recent content to your audience. You can even follow your influencer’s RSS feeds using this. These products help you save a ton of time in searching for good and fresh content. These tools ensure that the best content out there gets delivered to you in your inbox so that you don’t end up doing the heavy lifting.

Measure Time for Each Activity

Social media agencies that execute promotional campaigns for their clients, need to know exactly how much time they require to execute each task. Starting from chalking out a plan, gathering data, creating content, finalizing images, making the campaign live, to responding on social media. Tools like Timecamp help you in organizing and managing time when executing social media campaigns. Every late promotion is money on the table. So manage time effectively to push out campaigns on time.

Use Tools To Manage Social

Social Media has a vast scope, and you need to execute different tasks to be successful there. You need tools to help you publish content, respond to incoming conversations, give detailed reports, help you manage your team, check your competition’s strategy and so on. Social media marketers can lose a lot of time manually doing all these tasks. There are tools like SMhack, Tweetdeck, and IFTTT to help you get through your social media tasks in a timely manner.

It is so much important that you identify your goals in social media and plan accordingly. Based on these goals you have to select the right tools to manage time efficiently. There are many tools out there, each serving a unique purpose. Align these purposes with your goals and invest in them.

Are you familiar with the social media analytics tools mentioned in this list? These are the tools which I personally use. If you have used any other useful methods to manage time, let me know in the comments section below, and I will add them to this list. All marketers be advised, social media is a free medium. All it costs is time.

Author: Nikhil Premanandan

Nikhil is currently the head of marketing at SMhack, a social media management software startup. He likes to experiment with social media consistently and document his experiences in his blogs. He understands the hidden potential social media has and is always looking to learn. Nikhil also contributes regularly to Jeff Bullas, Social Media Examiner, and Maximize Social Business . When he’s not on Facebook you can find him digging the latest exploits of Tom Hanks and Steve Carell.