Remaining on top of things is hard for a business owner, and it gets even harder when you try to run your social media channels live.
Here’s a couple of time saving tips for running your social media strategy while not losing track of your business.
Mind your business
You might have a store with new products coming in, which require inventory, pricing and placement, or you might have a restaurant, dealing with customers, producers and workers, when, exactly, are you supposed to answer Facebook questions or find time to organise your online advertising?
It’s really hard to maintain both worlds active and one of the most common pitfalls is just forgetting about social media and leaving your pages to die. That’s a huge mistake which will cost you much more than the time you’ve spent keeping them running!
A dead page makes people think that the business itself isn’t active anymore, since they should go hand-in-hand, and therefore you might lose customers by not updating your social media channels.
So where do I clone myself?
The reason many are losing themselves between work and social media is actually not the quantity of work to do, because you still have to invest precious time on both of them.
The reason is that the same precious time needs to be reorganised in a more optimised manner.
Here are a couple of time saving tricks to help you out:
- Create a content calendar that will take you a couple of hours to set up, but will save you lots of time by organising your posts in a single data sheet.
Use Excel or Google sheets, you don’t really need a fancy app for that. - Schedule your posts so they get on your channels automatically on the date and time you chose. This is a huge time saver, not needing to stop what you’re doing and accessing your social media channels each and every time.
Many social media platforms have post scheduling implemented, Facebook has its own “schedule” button when posting, and Twitter uses Tweetdeck for that.
For platforms that don’t have post scheduling, like LinkedIn for example, you can use a third party Saas, like Buffer or Hootsuite.
Bonus tip:
This third tip is of an advice rather than a solution, since it has to do with enhancing your own skills rather than using a method.
Getting handy with social media is not really that complicated. The more you do it, the easier it’s gonna be: finding the right buttons, remembering the options at your disposal and accessing them directly instead of needing to look for them each and every single time, etc…
Make sure you get the hang of posting, snapping, updating or pinning, so that doing it won’t be as much of a chore, but more of a “hey, let me post snap a picture of that and post it on Instagram real quick” kinda thing, or a simple Periscope to show a real-time event to your followers.
One of the most liked content is real behind-the-scenes footage of your work life and what a normal customer doesn’t usually see. You can fulfil your followers’ curiosity by keeping them posted on what’s going on back there, and let them in on some shop secrets. This transparency will enormously boost their trust in your brand and will make sure your followers will come back for more, both on and offline.
Making sure you are capable of quickly snapping and posting behind-the-scenes updates, will make sure you will post more of this kind of content, and you will have another time saving method in your arsenal.
Got any time saving tips of your own? Feel free to share them with us in the comments section!
