Small business owners have a ton of responsibilities on their plates every day; unfortunately keeping up with social media isn’t usually on top of their lists. Social media has become a big part of most people’s lives these days, especially for business owners and entrepreneurs. It’s crucial to employ time management tips to stay on top of business and online engagement.
It is easy to get lost in the social media world and spend a lot of useless time on it. Not to mention the money you might spend on so-called online marketing experts offering training courses to get you more Facebook likes or website visitors. Even hiring a social media consultant doesn’t necessarily guarantee you a great outcome.
There are now thousands of social media platforms available, from the big hitters like Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn and Twitter to lesser known social sites like Wanelo, a place to find products, or Fark for submitting newsworthy stories. When it comes to social media you have a lot of opportunities to reach your consumers, locally and around the globe, you just have to figure out where to spend your valuable time to reach the right kind of people: those who are looking for your products or services. Here are some tips to help you spend your social media time more wisely.
Set yourself a dedicated time. For instance, every morning while you are drinking your morning coffee or tea you could allocate an hour to update your social media pages, and interact with your followers. This will allow you to stay on top of your social media interactions without being pulled too deeply into the social media-sphere. Remember, time is money!
Create social media challenges. Setting goals and accountability is the key to your social media success. Setting challenges for yourself can be done with only one hour of free time per day, simply follow the tasks you laid out beforehand.
Stay organized. Update a spreadsheet with current log-in information, a one-line biography, business and contact information, and create long and short term goals for your various social media campaigns. Remember to re-visit your goals from time to time.
Link your networks. This is especially important if you are doing your social media updating yourself. Link your accounts so when you post on one site it will automatically update a bunch of other sites as well. Look for sites like Tweetdeck or Buffer to link accounts.
Utilize time saving tools. Facebook Scheduled Posts is a great tool to way time. You can create multiple updates, text, photo and video, and schedule them to go live at a specific time and day. Tools like Socialoomph and Timely for Twitter will also schedule updates to release them automatically.
Social media isn’t going away any time soon, so you might as well embrace this important marketing tool for your small businesses. With social media, the idea is about making connections, rather than selling your products or services. Learn to listen to what your followers are telling you and what they care about, then give them what they are looking for in a time efficient way. After all, social media is all about creating relationships, and just like real life relationships, it will get easier and more rewarding as you go along.
