3 Tips for Social Updates When You Just Have No Time

When it comes to effectively managing social media efforts, it is virtually impossible to be on top of all the social networks all the time. Especially when you consider how many there are; Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Reddit, Pinterest, Instagram, Snapchat, Vine, Tumblr, etc.

Researching what works on which site, where your target audience is active, and whether or not your efforts are even working, can stretch any social media marketer pretty thin.

This article is certainly not meant to be a shortcut to social media success; nothing is. However, for those who need to manage coverage on numerous social networks or who are juggling too many hats in a single role, here are 3 tips to help maintain your social accounts on a little amount of time.

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Find the Balance Between Original and Curated Content

Everyone should want to have their own unique content and updates, but you can still represent your brand by curating content to fill the gaps in your content schedule when needed.

When curating content to post on your social accounts, consider the following:

  • All curated content is really high quality
  • It is useful to your audience
  • It is something you have the ability to discuss and stand behind
  • Add your own insights around the topic
  • Summarize the value of the content in your update
  • Mention, tag, link to the sources or authors of the content

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Make Use of Social Media Tools

When it comes to posting across multiple social platforms, and sometimes across multiple accounts, utilizing tools to help simplify and streamline your efforts can be essential to a social media manager looking to get the most of their time.

That said, remember that quality is extremely important in social media today, so don’t allow the use of tools to reduce the quality of work you are doing. Tools make it easy to shortcut on quality, so use them to help streamline and save time, without reducing the quality of your updates.

Social Media Management Tools

Hootsuite or Buffer are two of the most referenced social management tools, and for good reason. They are both rather inexpensive (free at times), allow a wide selection of social site integrations and options, as well as providing the ability for you to schedule your social media updates across multiple platforms and accounts, in a high quality format.

Some sites like Facebook have their own scheduling function, but many other social sites still have no way to allow you to schedule updates outside of these 3rd party tools.

Some tools have even been built around specialist roles, such as Viraltag, which is more focused on posting images. It’s great for certain platforms like Pinterest and Twitter, wherein images play a major role, making it known to most people as the Buffer for images.

Trigger Tools

If you want to get more advanced over the control you can have with your social media accounts, then you have to check out IFTTT, which stands for ‘If This Then That’. With IFTTT you can make ‘recipes’ for any specific action you want to take by connecting two actions together through the tool. For instance, you can send emails or share posts when you use a certain hashtag on Twitter or archive photos automatically when you get tagged on Facebook.

IFTTT can take a little experimenting and learning, but it has numerous helpful recipes and a great search engine off their site, to find existing and popular recipes.

If you’re interested with automating a good bit of your social media work, then this is definitely one to look closely at.

Content Curation Tools

Following multiple social media platforms can be a difficult and time consuming task, but one that can help a ton when saving time in social media. Feedly is great for aggregating RSS and Social Media into one place, along with recommended content based on your subscribed feeds and accounts. Reddit is a great aggregate site, where you can subscribe to Subreddits and see the most popular content on the internet at any given time.

Following is just as important as posting–if not more–since you have to be in the know about everything happening in your industry. Using something like Feedly and Reddit to do this can save you a lot of tie that you can otherwise use to create more content.

Social Mention Tools

Sometimes Google Alerts just isn’t enough to stay on top of things, so check out the appropriately-named Social Mention for alerting you to things happening across social media as they happen.

Since juggling multiple platforms can be quite daunting, this can help ease that burden.

Content Creation Tools

Visuals are pretty important for attracting an audience in social media, so try using something like Canva which makes graphic design easier even for those who don’t fancy themselves a designer. You can also edit photos, so you can post those selfies and food photos with confidence after a few touch-ups.

*Take note that these are merely tools for making things a bit easier and more convenient; they aren’t meant to replace solid understanding of how social media fundamentally works. You don’t need to use any of them if you don’t really want to, but there’s no reason not to want things to run more efficiently, so you might as well embrace whatever makes managing social media better for you.

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Analyze What Works

You may feel like you’re getting decent results from your social media efforts, but really challenge yourself if thats good enough.

What separates nominally good brands from the really great ones, is often in the details. Data analytics can help you recognize your strengths and weaknesses, letting you come up with solutions to problems and answers to questions. The power of analytics can never be underestimated, especially if it’s used right.

Google Analytics is perhaps the most powerful and readily available analytics tools, but have to spent any time checking out the social media reports? it’s also great for following your social media accounts’ performance closely. You can see how many people look at your social media pages, from which referrals they’re coming from, which posts are performing well and which aren’t, and so on.

Meanwhile, most major social media platforms now include some insights that tell you which content performs well on social. For Facebook, you can even track how your competitors are doing in terms of follower growth and engagement.

Testing and reviewing your data can be huge in helping you get more out of your social media efforts, so make sure you tap into your various analytics and insight accounts.

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    • Brent Csutoras

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