How to Do Small Business Social Media in Less Time

December 23, 2015

Post other people’s social media content

By Maureen McCabe

As you know, social media is an invaluable tool for your inbound marketing campaign. That being said, as any small business owner will tell you, being successful on social media requires a lot of time and effort! Fortunately, instead of dedicating hours every week to managing your Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social networks, you can take several steps to streamline your small business social media efforts. Here is how to get started:

Start creating — and stockpiling — your social content well in advance

One of the biggest problems many companies run into while executing their small business social media strategies is trying to get great content together in a timely manner. It is easy to find yourself scrambling to create a new image, video or text-based post minutes before you want to send it out. However, if you already have a collection of posts on deck, you can get things out hassle-free. Spending a few hours up front writing posts, collecting the images you need and collecting articles to share will make your day-to-day social media tasks much easier.

Post on multiple social networks all at once

One of the biggest social media marketing mistakes you can make is to post on your social networks one at a time. While this may be required on occasion (you may want to post something on Facebook that is well out of the bounds of Twitter’s 140-character limit), most of your posts will be quite similar.

Invest in a user-friendly social network management tool like Hootsuite which will allow you to post simultaneously on all networks, such as your LinkedIn personal profile, LinkedIn company page, Twitter and Facebook. Other platforms such as Pinterest and Instagram can only be managed directly from their website or mobile app. These platforms also measure and track the performance of all of your social networks with their built-in reporting features.

Set up alerts for industry news

As your small business social media presence burgeons, people will start to rely on you for news related to your industry. Even if you aren’t the one breaking the news, you can still reliably get it to your followers if you keep up with the latest industry happenings as they happen. You can easily establish a Google Alerts system for keywords or news websites related to your industry; this way, you don’t have to go digging for newsworthy information all the time.

Post other people’s social media content

There is already plenty of great social media content being created right now, and you can start using it to bolster the quality and online presence of your social media page ASAP. We aren’t suggesting you start plagiarizing here, but by sharing other people’s content while making sure they still receive credit for it, you can show people you are aware and active on social media. Because it only takes a couple of clicks and a brief caption to share someone else’s post, you can save a huge amount of time by doing this on a consistent basis.

*Note: don’t simply share other peoples’ content. Your audience still wants to view content created by you. If you overdo content sharing, people will simply cut out the middleman, unfollow you and follow the pages you are constantly sharing.

Steal your own stuff

Other people’s content isn’t all that you should share. You should also share your best blog posts, eBooks, photos and other types of existing content on your social networks. This will strengthen the reach of your other inbound marketing channels, while allowing you to add a great post in seconds without breaking a sweat.

Outsource at least some of your social media tasks

The most effective way to save time on social media is to have someone else do it for you. As such, you should consider outsourcing at least a portion of your social media efforts to a professional, or have a marketing consultant help you create a plan of action that makes social media easier for you to tackle.

For more about how to improve your social media strategy, feel free to ask a savvy marketing person.

Check out these posts:

Choosing the Right Social Media Platform for Your Business
Free Business Directory Guide
Six Key Benefits of Social Media for Business Owners.

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