Maintaining a successful social media marketing strategy that produces good results is all about managing your time efficiently. It is very easy to waste hours analyzing what others are doing on channels such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. Are you spending your time on your selected channels wisely so that you can get the most out of it?
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You will find many digital marketing professionals online stating that social media marketing is free, but this isn’t true at all. Of course most of the top social media channels are free, but the time you are spending on these channels isn’t free. To maximize your time and to help you strategise and get the most out of your content efforts, here are a couple of tips that you can use in your campaign.
1. Get into the habit
There is really no difference between a habit and a routine. You know exactly what you need to do every day with your campaign, and doing it is going to take a little bit of dedication. Why not turn this into a habit that you can follow everyday? At the beginning of each day, work through each channel and piece of content that you use, but limit it to a specific amount of time. These limits you set up will help you stick to a time schedule, and will keep you productive and make sure you’re not going overboard each day. It is simple… get into the habit of working on your social media strategy every day.
2. Automating simple processes
Use various automation tools to help you with your social media marketing strategy. Even though many people will say this is not the way to go, if you are publishing a new blog post everyday and then manually sharing it to Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, why not automate the process? This doesn’t mean automating everything, only the tasks you are doing every day. There are various automation tools you can use such as Tweetdeck and Hootsuite that can make your life easier.
3. Creating content at the beginning of the month
If you create most your blog posts and content at the beginning of every month, create a schedule where you can publish posts on set days. Publishing the content is much easier than creating the content. If you dedicated a day to the creation of new content and blog posts at the beginning of each month, you will not have to spend hours creating content every day. Preparing publish-ready content in bulk can save you hours on your daily schedule.
4. Prioritise your social media channels
It is impossible to maintain 100% efficiency on all the social media channels you are using all the time. Look at the analytics from each channel and determine which channels need work. Rank all the channels you are using on a scale of 1-10 in order of importance. Spend time and research the channels that need more content and interaction. Spreading yourself too thin on many channels will not work. The bottom line with is that you should concentrate your efforts on the channels that need content the most.
Social media burn out
If you are working on your social media strategy all the time, you can experience a social media burnout. If you are spending too much time on one channel every day, this can happen to you. If you are only working on Facebook and spend a lot of personal time on that channel, eventually this can invade your work time. Avoid a social media burnout by separating your social media strategy from your personal social media activities.
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