Social media continues to play a vital role in digital marketing. Brands and marketers equally are forced to adapt towards this fast-paced movement yet with no roadmap in hand to help them navigate the social maze. Managing a social media presences for your brand can be challenge let alone a time consuming initiative that most brands simply do not account for in a realistic fashion. Making sense of it though in a systematic and sequential fashion may actually save time, money, and unwanted headaches.
Between the Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, SnapChat, LinkedIn, Google+, Pinterest, and any other social media network I failed to mention, there really isn’t much time for anything else. Social media management can quickly become a time suck that ultimate creates a sense of mental exhaustion for most brands. In my experience I’ve discovered that you need to be systematic and strategic about social media management in a non-exhausting type of way. That being said, here’s a few strategic tactics you can employ to hep with social media management efficiency.
Content Curation
Pumping out fresh content that is interesting, engaging, and conversational is a key ingredient of a social media strategy. A fine point of detail to emphasize upon is the 80/20 rule. Focusing 80% of the time on sharing other people’s content and the other 20% reserved for so-called ‘shameless self-promotion’ or also known as self-endorsement. This particular step can be a time suck and therefore requires a more efficient approach to it. Leverage the potential of these tools to assist with content curation process.
These are top three industry-leading tool you can leverage for the content creation process of your social media strategy. Each can assist with identifying trending topics and subjects that are shareable and buzzworthy.
Post Scheduling
For each individual social media platform that you’re currently engaged with you’ll have to factor in post scheduling. For Facebook, scheduling status updates. For Twitter, scheduling tweets, etc. etc. You get the gist of it. I personally am not a big fan of post scheduling and even wrote a recent post on the ‘5 reasons why I won’t automate another tweet‘. For the busy professional thought this simply is not an option due to a hectic schedule. A few simple to use tools for social media post scheduling that I would highly recommend include the following:
The entire purpose here is to queue up enough content so that you are consistently pushing out fresh information. The automation aspect will assist in increased opportunity for engagement and authority with your social media communities.
Engagement
A large part of social media entails in actual engagement with influential users. Spending time on the individual social media networks and playing this part strategically will help spark engaging conversations. In simpler terms, just talk to people who have interest in what you have to say or vice versa. When it comes to the actual engagement, consider the following tactics:
- Check for any mentions within your stream and respond accordingly and in a timely fashion
- Peruse through your news feed to find conversations from authoritative users that you can contribute to with some fresh perspective
- Add any additional users to Twitter lists for continuous monitoring and quick reference
- Show appreciation by thanking corresponding users. Manners still matter even in the virtual world and gratitude goes a long way. Be kind and thank those individuals who are communicative and engaging with you
Social media management is a bit of an organic process. Something that a lot of busy professionals unfortunately dislike due to time constraints and extensive involvements. The tactics listed above should help you fast forward through your daily social media endeavors by making them more efficient.
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