5 Tips to Save You Time on Your Social Media Marketing Strategy

If there’s anyone who knows how stressful the feeling of a never-ending workload can be, it’s social media marketers.

An average day can involve checking social media networks multiple times, keeping up to date on fresh and engaging content, scheduling said content, responding to messages and mentions, identifying influencers and reviewing post performance. It’s enough to make anyone’s head spin, and that’s without even getting into the other parts of the job!

If you’re a marketer who needs some advice on how to break up your workload into manageable chunks, you’ve come to the right place. Read on and feel your sanity being restored.

1. Multi-tasking: don’t do it!

Contrary to popular belief, 98% of the population doesn’t multi-task effectively. This means that only 2% are actually proficient at doing many things at once, and these people are considered outliers.

The majority of people aren’t actually multi-tasking — rather, they’re shifting back and forth from one task to another. Each time a different task is started, the brain needs time to refocus. While multi-tasking may seem efficient, it actually isn’t. Studies show that multi-tasking can actually reduce productivity by as much as 40%.

While it may take some time to readjust your working habits, it’ll pay off in the long run. Make a daily schedule or to-do list, decide which task you need to focus on, and see it through rather than flitting in between five different tasks. Your brain will thank you!

2. Choose channels wisely

This is a no-brainer, but the more channels you are active on, the more time you’ll spend on social media. Do some research and work to understand your audience. Examine your performance reviews and analytics to determine which channels are most relevant to your target market.

As a rule of thumb, all businesses should be on Facebook and Instagram. However, does your audience engage with Twitter and YouTube? Find out and refine your content strategy according to this data.

3. The answer’s in the data

Are you up to date with your social media engagement data? While you’ve probably read about the best times to post content, your own data is the best indicator of when you should be posting and scheduling.

Use native platform tools like Twitter Analytics and Facebook Insights to determine when your audience is most active. Then, schedule around these times and watch your engagements rise. This way, you can justify uploading less content as the posts you’re already uploading are reaching engagement targets.

4. Prepare templates

To maximise your time and save yourself from doing the same repetitive tasks, make some templates to use for your graphics and posts. You can easily make clean, visually pleasing graphic templates for Instagram, Twitter and Facebook posts using a software like Canva. This way, when you have something to post, all you need to do is adjust the text and image with the resolution and layout already in place.

Another good idea is to have a document accessible on all your devices with your brand’s hashtags ready to copy and paste. You can also prepare a spreadsheet with potential formulas for headlines, blog posts and short social copy to pull from when you need to get a post up quickly.

5. Plan and schedule

Devise a core structure for the content on each platform that you can tweak and update each week. For example, on Facebook, you can post a funny image on Monday, a staff insight story on Tuesday, some commentary on a current affair on Wednesday, a #ThrowbackThursday post on Thursday, and a video on Friday.

Schedule your content around your engagement data, and update your posts based on what’s happening with your business that week. Use the schedule solely as a guide, but know that if you’ve had a busy few days, you have some content ideas to fall back upon without neglecting your brand.