4 Time-Saving Social Media Tips You Should Start Using

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Social media can be a time consuming effort, though it doesn’t have to be. There are plenty of ways you can save time on your social media effort. All it takes is a little creativity, a little organization and some great social media tools. So, let’s take a look.

1. Utilize a social media management system when posting

Automating the social media posting that you do is one of the most important techniques you can take advantage of.  With all of the various social media platforms that are out there, you should post to each of the platforms.  However, that is very time consuming.  You also need to customize your content for every platform.

Then you need to go to each individual site and post your content.  This can be a big waste of your time.  You have to stop whatever you are doing, which can not only waste valuable time but distract you from other important work that you were doing to go do your posting on social media, which itself can be a time-wasting distraction.  So that’s potentially double the time that you waste.

If you can get this entire process automated, you will save lots of time.  An automated system will help you stay on track with a consistent social media schedule, and also help to streamline all of your efforts on social media across channels.

You also don’t want to waste even more time searching for the ideal tool.  Just get one.  It isn’t necessary to have more than one tool to use.  They all work fine and can save you lots of time.  Just get your time-saving tool and then start to use it.  That’s the most important thing that you need to do.

There are plenty of great tools out there for organizing your social media efforts. A social media dashboard provides an all in one place to manage the social media platforms of choice. Needless to say this is a massive benefit as it allows you to see everything in one place, organize and schedule updates and also monitor interactions easily. All well worth considering if you wish to save time on your social media efforts.

2. Limit Yourself to Two To Three Platforms

Target a few platforms and master them, instead of just dabbling in many of them.  These days social media is quite complex.  Every platform comes with more features now, and there is a steeper learning curve.

Focus your efforts on the platforms that your customers tend to spend a majority of their time on and that fits in with your industry.  Use the 80/20 rule.  If you focus on only two to three platform, you will be using your time very efficiently and it will have a greater impact on those platforms since you will be able to learn how to use these effectively.

Make sure to have a team member from your customer service department respond to inquiries and questions.

If you have a customer service team or help desk department, have someone assigned to respond to social media inquiries.

Social media websites for many businesses are their de factor customer service centers.  If a customer has an issue, problem, or question, they will often ask their question on the social media site.

There isn’t any wrong with that, however it can take time away from being able to do your other tasks on social media, as well as increase your workload.

This role should be assigned to a person whose main responsibility is to respond to customer questions.  If you happen to be the one with this responsibility, make sure you set aside time every day so you don’t end up losing large chunks of time.

3. Set Brand Alerts Up

If you’d like to closely monitor how, where and when our brand gets mentioned online, set alerts up so that you will get an email notification.  Many individuals use Google Alerts, especially since it is a free service.  However, it does provide spotty service at times.  There is a paid service called Mention.com that tracks webs and social media mentions.  There are other tools like Hootsuite that track social mentions as well and will send you an email.

4. Set Up a Tweet Bank

This is basically a collection of tweet language that you can draw on and adapt whenever you are write tweets as well as other kinds of posts for social media.

Despite its name, it goes beyond sample tweets and can contain Google+ updates, and Facebook updates.

Have standard language compiled for different situations, like sample Facebook posts for your latest special offers.  You can also have a tweet to announce when your next sale is and so forth.  Keep those templates within your One Note app, Evernote or Word document or other kind of digital file.  That will help save you time on your social media efforts by not need to reinvent the wheel every time you have an update to compose.