With so many social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat, etc. it can be overwhelming to choose which platforms to use for your brand and how to manage them effectively. Effectively managing your social media presence will draw attention to your business creating long-lasting relationships with your target audience. To achieve online success all your bases have to be covered which isn’t an easy task because of all the pressure of a competitive crowded market. Knowing which social media platform to use in your marketing strategy is one thing but, coming up with a marketing campaign and managing it is a whole different story. Finding the balance for content creation, handling customer service and engagement, carrying out promotional and advertising campaigns is a lot to juggle. All these tasks need to be handled carefully to run a successful social media business.
Here are some tips that will help you control your presence on social media, manage your time better, and create content that is engaging with your audience.
Tips to effectively manage your social media platforms
Develop a strategy and plan
It’s extremely important to come up with a strategic social media plan which will help your business come up with an achievable successful plan. Customers expect your company to be good at engaging with them on social platforms and responding to them quickly. If you’re not responsive, it can negatively affect your business. Coming up with a plan and documenting your social media strategy will help you focus on what you need to do, understand your objectives and goals, and know what steps you need to take to achieve them. Planning and being focused will minimize time wastage and help improve your company’s productivity on social media.
There are some questions you need to ask yourself when developing this strategy.
- What is the purpose of committing your time and resources to social media?
- Who is your target audience?
- What are you trying to achieve and how will social media help your business achieve it?
- Which channels will you use to achieve your goals?
- How will you engage with your audience?
Having a clear answer to these questions will help you understand your short-term and long-term goals. You can now create a plan that will meet your goals. Each goal should have its own plan that you can break down into small projects and tasks to make them more manageable and easier to complete. Having a clear plan that is well laid out will make you more decisive with less time wastage and discussions.
Create a Content Calendar
A content calendar will help you plan what you need to put out on each media platform, what visuals will work well with your content, and organize your follow-up activities. Such a calendar helps you to optimize your posts on each media platform because they all have different requirements. You need to tailor your visuals to suit the needs of each target audience in each platform.
Once you’ve planned, you have more time to think about what content to include in your posts that will reflect on your personality and brand message. If you have old posts that were successful in the past, performed very well, and increased the amount of engagement, you can repurpose it get new images and copy it. Be creative and innovative and don’t be afraid to think outside the box with content creation.
Utilize the tools
There are many tools available for you to use on social media that can be a great asset to help you effectively create, plan, and manage engaging content that you want to post in your social media accounts. Timing is very critical when it comes to posting content and a tool to help you schedule your posts will really come in handy. HootSuite will enable you to select the image you want, set time, include a link, and generate a post in a very organized manner that you can post in all social platforms.
Another tool you can use to schedule your emails is MailChimp which is an email marketing tool that helps you create a group of emails that are included in your mailing list as per your schedule. It has pre-designed templates and customizable editing and sending options. You don’t always have to create your own content. Having a tool like Feedly that provides great curated content with valuable resources and relevant information for your followers will save you time and increase customer engagement.
Establishing processes
Establishing well-designed processes will improve the efficiency and quality of your work. You can avoid coming up with new ways to complete an activity every time. You save a lot of time especially when you aren’t the only one who is involved in the activity. You can use processes to create posts on Facebook or tweets, document tasks involved when publishing blog posts, and many more. Processes don’t have to write in Microsoft Word, you can have a checklist that will save you time and help you understand what you’re supposed to do daily, weekly, monthly, or in the long term.
To get more followers to read your content there are certain procedures you can follow like posting interesting photos, sharing posts with other informal sites, commenting on other people’s posts, etc. which can be a slow process. The best way would be to get Instagram Auto followers, for example, to build popularity and advertise your brand. Once you have developed the processes and checklists you can then automate your tasks. You can set up simple commands that are linked to different applications to automatically perform actions when triggered. You can automate the sharing process of new blog posts to your audience.
Final words
Managing social media platforms is not just done one way, there are many other ways you can manage your social accounts especially when it comes to time management. You can waste a lot of time doing something over and over with no results. Having a plan and goals to achieve makes you focused and motivated.