So, you’ve started a business, set up all your social media channels and you’re starting to grow your businesses presence online. But keeping up with posting and producing valuable content is time-consuming, and lets face it, it stresses you out!
The truth is, for small business owners, free time is a myth. You do anything and everything for your business as and when it's needed, and the last thing you need to worry about is ensuring that you have enough relevant content to post on social media, as well as posting enough to engage with your followers regularly.
We've put together some time–saving social media tips for you, designed to free up your precious time and allow you to grow your business. Before you know it you’ll have your brand online without having to be glued to your screen. In a nutshell start by thinking up some social media marketing ideas, think about how you'll prepare these ideas, and you’ll be on your way to having a slick and easy social media process.
Build 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.
Yo udon't need to aim to post everyday of the week, instead, look at posting between 3-5 days a week, ensuring you post at a time that your target audience will be online.
Build a content bank
This one is a life saver! build a content bank with a mass of valuable content, from 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 many free tools out there which empower you to create amaingcontent. Platforms such as Canva give you a variety of templates to create your own eye-catching graphics and videos to add to your content bank.
You should also save your most important hashtags too. Create a document with all the hashtags that you will use for all of 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.
Copy, copy, copy!
Spend some time to focus on writing copy for your posts that is 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, instead, make sure you’re well prepared to smooth talk your audience into investing in your brand.
Simple, clear and concise works best. Say what you need as succinctly as possible, and remember to avoid massive blocks of text (space those sentences out).
Go green
You’ve spent hours creating beautiful, engaging content and with just one swift click all those hours feel wasted on a single post. Well, reuse it!
Cross post your content over all your social 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 content is seen by the right audience at multiple times.
Did you create a post that was amazing a month ago? Reuse it! you've got the foundations so just breath some new life into it and make some tweaks and repost. It's like you've got new followers that haven't seen the original post, and the content will likely be highly engaging for a second time.
Use 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. Our personal premium favourite is AgoraPulse, and if you want a real time saving social tool it's definitely worth checking out.
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 an energy drain.
Stay focussed
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.
Come to think of it, that last paragraph is just a brilliant life coaching lesson, but we're not in that space... yet.
To surmise, 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. Some content is better than no content.
