Social Media Marketing has caused more than its fair share of whining amongst small businesses. They struggle with it. And I understand why. I struggle with it myself! It’s time consuming and draining and the return on investment can be difficult to measure. I thought I’d give you an inside look into my process, and share with you a few tips that have helped me keep up with social media.
Make lists/groups of people you should interact with and watch. Twitter does this well and gives you separate feeds per group. This lumps your followers into smaller, more manageable groups and helps you compartmentalize your interactions. I use categories based on location or industry type.
Check in once a day for a few minutes. Don’t let it get behind! Social Media is fast and timely. If you aren’t staying on top of things, and responding to follows and messages in a timely manner, people will move on and forget why they were ever contacting you or who you are.
I had a client ask once how her competitor was posting so much. She had seen tweets of his from 10pm the night before and 3am that morning. “When did he have time to sleep?” she asked. Social Media Scheduling. That’s what he was doing. Scheduling apps such as Hootsuite or Buffr allow you to plan ahead with your posts so all you need to do is sit back and watch them go out.
I like to set aside a time once a week, and schedule my posts for the week. Yes, you will still need to check in throughout the week and interact, but the main bulk of the posts will already be planned out.
This one seems like a no brainer. Use apps such as Tweetbot, Facebook Pages, Instagram and the Hootsuite app to check your content and upload new content on the fly. This is especially helpful if you are using any sort of local content. Upload photos from local events as they are happening. Tweet about networking events while you are present. With social media being a whopping 34% of mobile traffic (source), we can assume that a few people will likely be checking in on their social media whilst at these events and you can interact with them and gain exposure when it’s relevant.
Once I’ve convinced a client that they should be posting on social media, the next question is invariably whatwhat should they be posting about. We call the process of developing content “content curation”. I talk more about this in a few other posts such as here and here so if you are a content marketing newbie, you might want to read up.
Here are two tools that I use on the regular for content curation on social media.
Bookmarking apps such as Pinterest, Pocket or even using the bookmarking in your browser can be a great way to hold onto relevant articles or threads that you may want to refer to later or post to your social media sites. I use Pocket, which has a convenient browser extension. With one click, I can save the article for later. Then when I go to schedule my posts, I can look over all that I’ve saved throughout the week.
RSS feeders are great for content curation. You can follow other blogs or websites and bookmark articles that might also be relevant to your users. I use Feedly to set up feeds for myself, categorized by topic.
Social Media Marketing is always going to be something that takes work to be successful. It takes consistency, and a whole lot of blood, sweat and tears. And there may come a time when you decide that it is not the best way to spend your time. That is okay too. You can hire someone to post for you, and even to write articles for you.
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