Time Management Tips for Social Media Marketing

Does managing the social media for your business take up too much of your precious time? Here are some tips to help streamline your process and manage your time effectively.

1. Have a Marketing Strategy

Set yourself up for success by creating a proper marketing strategy. Your marketing strategy should cover the who, what, where, when, why, and how of what you should be doing with your marketing.

It requires putting in time upfront to develop the strategy that you need, but in the long run you’ll save yourself time every day, week, and month because you’ll be able to sit down and work on your marketing with purpose and direction.

Without a marketing strategy, you’ll end up spinning your wheels, spending time and resources on marketing efforts in an ad hoc “pray and hope” marketing cycle. But with a good strategy in place, you’ll be able to sit down to work with confidence every day knowing that your plan will actually get you results.

2. Create a Master List of Hashtags

Do some research about the hashtags that are related to your industry that people are actually looking for and using on a regular basis. When you use hashtags that people are interested in, you’ll capture more attention for your brand and have a better chance of growing your audience.

Having a list to refer to will make it much more efficient to write content that gets noticed. Plus, it’s a big time saver as you don’t need to go looking for new hashtags to use each time you post on social media. Make a great go-to list once, then return to that list a couple of times a year to see if it needs updating.

3. Create a Content Library

We keep our content library in a spreadsheet so that we have a record of all of the content we’ve written in the past. We organize the content according to different categories, for example: Blog Posts, Curated Content, and Promotional Content. We write the content here first, before it goes live, so that we have a record of it.

When you need inspiration, you can refer to your old content, and you can also re-use evergreen content, like non-date specific blog posts, at various times in the future. Having this handy reference along with your marketing strategy also helps you to stay on-brand with your message.

4. Have a Content Creation Schedule

Don’t try to squeeze in marketing when you have time—that’s a good way to never make any progress! If you want to get results and manage your time effectively, you need to make it a priority and put it in your calendar.

We create most of our content once a month. By the 15th of the month, I provide my wonderful editor and graphic designer, Jill, content to proofread and copy she can use to create graphics for the coming month. We have this content scheduled by the last week of the month so that it’s ready to go out in a timely and efficient manner.

By organizing the bulk of your content in advance, you can be more strategic about the flow of content for the entire month. It also gives you the freedom to be agile in the moment—if there’s some new piece of news or a trend that you want to catch, you’re available to adjust as you go. Having most of your content written ahead of time also gives you the time to engage with your network, rather than to wonder every morning what you want to say that day.

5. Use Smart Tools

Enlist the help of excellent tools to streamline your process. We use Cloud Campaign for all of our evergreen content on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, and Buffer for Instagram content as well as any one-time use content that isn’t evergreen on the other channels. Having these tools definitely makes our process more efficient!

6. Set up News Alerts & RSS Feeds for Your Industry

Keep up with the latest news and make curating industry content easy with Google news alerts and RSS feeds. You can easily set up a Google News Alert by following these instructions.

7. Get Help

Quite often, the best use of your time isn’t in marketing. Unless you’re an actual marketer yourself, it’s going to take you a lot longer to get things done, and the results won’t be as impactful as they would be for an expert.

At a certain point in your business growth, outsourcing your marketing might make good business sense. It might be that you just need training and systems to be put in place to get you on the right track, or maybe you’ll be better off handing the whole project off to expert social media marketers. Either way, we offer a free consultation. Contact us if you’d like to have an honest chat about your marketing needs.