Time Savings Tips to Keep Your Social Networks Lively

by Manon Leroux

Once you begin finding some success with social media for your business, it’s common to come up against resourcing challenges and to discover an increasing need to spend more time cultivating social conversation online around your brand. Sometimes when this happens, companies lose steam and their content creation drops, along with their audience engagement.

Other times, companies hire external talent to come in and manage their brand’s reputation.

Whether you are managing your social content yourself, plan on hiring internally or finding someone outside of your organization to help you with your social media, there are some time-saving tips that will help you to be more efficient with your posting and responding, keeping you focused on your objectives at hand so you can garner more favourable results.

Have a Plan

This may seem obvious, but surprisingly many companies don’t have a plan. They spend time aimlessly posting and commenting on their social sites but don’t have an overall strategy or approach with the type of content they post. When you have a plan in place, you can measure your results against your objectives over time to really understand what works and what doesn’t. Also, you will train your staff and representatives to think more strategically rather than just being a mouthpiece for your company.

Use Them.

There are a variety of excellent social media tools available to help you manage your posts and comments.  There are tools for managing all of your social activities in one place with one login, there are other tools that help you automate and schedule your tweets, and there are tools to help you with your listening and social media monitoring. And let’s not forget reporting; lots of great tools for that too. With all of the available social media tools at your disposal, you should be able to save yourself a significant amount of time and a few headaches.

Time blocking.

Rather than compulsively checking your accounts a hundred times a day or bouncing between tasks and Twitter, block your time off. Schedule time two or three times a day in fifteen or twenty minute increments to reply and engage with fans and commenters. Schedule time to create content as well. You should have an editorial calendar with your content mapped out each month. Of course you can always leave room for flexibility, but doing the groundwork first and then blocking off the time to create your content will help you tremendously.

Don’t be an aimless drunken sailor wandering the open seas of social media without a plan. Think about what you are doing, employ best practices, and save time by being efficient. You will be so glad you did.