Are you trying to juggle multiple social media profiles? Have you not got enough time and resources to keep your profiles up to date?
Social Media is a powerful tool to help businesses increase their online presence, awareness, community and traffic to their website.
However, many businesses lack the time and resources to dedicate to their social media activities to make them effective, and they normal do this sporadically when time is not on their side.
In making sure that your social media is effective, you need to be organised and planned. It’s like with anything in life, if we are not organised it doesn’t quite go to plan! So it’s important to have a social media strategy and plan of content for your social media activities.
I say to businesses if you had a regular monthly meeting with your marketing team for 1.5/2 hours a month to talk about your content and actions you can then plan and diarilise these over the following month.
Creating the content is what takes the time when it comes to social media. Making sure you have engaging content that your audience will like and respond to.
Most businesses each day will sit for 40 minutes to an hour thinking about what to write and post. Whereas if you have time to plan each month all you need to do is refer to your content editorial calendar! This will save you so much time in the long run.
Once you have your content editorial calendar you can then decide which ones you would like to schedule and which ones are most appropriate to do in real time.
We schedule our regular blog posts, event dates, facts etc. We don’t schedule conversation and news as this should happen in real time allowing you to then respond to any engagement from your audience.
There are many social media management tools available to help you save more time. The tools have many different features including scheduling, monitoring, measuring and engagement.
Some of the tools we would recommend are;
Sendible – A social media management tool that enables us as an agency to schedule relevant posts, engage in real time with our communities, monitor key words in a local area and produce regular reports of our social media activity. Sendible has a 30 day trial so you can try out the power of this great tool.
Constant Contact – Sending regular email newsletters is important to keep in touch with existing and potential clients. Keep them up to date with what you are up to, share invaluable information such as blogs and tips. Also offers and promotions you have too. Constant Contact has a FREE email campaign promotion at the moment! Go try it out.
Hootsuite – A social media management tool which is free for up to three profiles. If you are new in business and do not have a big budget then this would be perfect for you. A great place to start. Hootsuite can schedule, monitor and provide measurement reports each month too.
So where do you start? I would start by selecting a date in the diary to sit down with your marketing and start planning your social media content for the following month. Then decide on which tool you will use to help you save time and start making social media work for your business.
If you still feel you don’t have the time and resources in house, ZC Social Media can help you! We provide social media management and happy to discuss with you. Email gareth@zcsocialmedia.com for more information.