You have your social media strategy set up with the goals you want to achieve, and have carefully analyzed the ways to make your strategy successful. Social media marketing is free when it’s done naturally, so you just have to pay for the time it takes to manage your social media. Here are some great time savers to get you started:

• Make sure you are aligned with your strategy. You spent all that time putting together your strategy to save time in the long run.
• Measure for success. There are so many things you can measure on social media, so it’s crucial that you only spend time measuring those items that are important to your business. You may have hundreds of thousands of followers but if none of them are helping you out, they are not being beneficial. It is important to measure how many times your content is getting shared, how many times your site is being viewed from social media, how many times those visitors click on the call to action, etc.

• Calender it out. Most of your content should be calendered in, so you have a set schedule and routine that your target market can look forward to. That way you won’t have to think of these items on the fly, everything is laid out for you. A few good examples are having monthly themes, appreciating your clients, recognizing employees, etc.

• Scheduled for success. A few short years ago, scheduling on social media was frowned on by some, a taboo by others. Now everybody is doing it to increase your return on investment. This can be one of the best time savers at your disposal.

• Optimize your posting times. This is crucial. There is no reason to be posting your social media content when nobody is reading it. The best universal posting times are right before breakfast, lunch and right after work. These times will fluctuate, depending on your target market and should be tested with every social media campaign.  

• Build your brand ambassadors. Your brand ambassadors can be anybody that is loyal to your brand or business. A few good examples are loyal Twitter followers, people you meet at business networking functions, former coworkers, etc. It is important to nurture your brand ambassadors and cross promote as needed.

• Automatically populate all blog posts to social media. We use Hubspot to auto populate our blogs, but there are lots of other good free tools out there. After you auto populate your first one, then you want to schedule in reports of your blog into your calendar.

• Set up lists. Social media, and especially Twitter, has become a fire hose of information. You should put your most valuable people, companies and individuals into lists so you can easily track them without all of the extra social media noise. A few good examples are clients, competitors, thought leaders, etc. Make use of lists such as Twitter lists, or lists in monitoring tools such as Hootsuite to track these must-reads.
• Use Dashboards to consolidate. You can very easily set up a dashboard on Hootsuite, or another similar tool. Your dashboard should be linked to all of your social media so you can view it all in one place.
• Use a Curation service to share third party content. We use Curata and love how it works, but there are all kinds of free tools out there that work good too, such as Google Alerts.
• Track your social media content that gets shared the most. This is crucial. There is no reason to be posting content on social media that is not getting read and shared by your target market.

These are just some key ways to save time on your social media management. There are many more ways out there and your list should be continuously  evolving as your social media evolves, but this is a great place to start. What are some other ways that you can think of to save time on your social media management? Please let me know if you have any thoughts or questions at any time. I am here to help.