Time Management Tips for Social Media
Are you brave enough to admit how much time you spend on social media for your business?
If you know you’re spending too much time, then this blog is for you. You may be surprised that you can do less yet be more effective.
Length of Time Businesses Should Spend On Social Media
So, what is the best length of time to spend on social media every week? This all depends on the type of business you have and where your business is on its social media journey.
You shouldn’t just be focusing on the time it takes to create and publish a post. You should also consider the time needed to respond to messages, to reply to comments and the time to invest in liking and commenting on others’ posts.
Engagement outside of your own accounts is crucial as the platforms will reward you for being an active and engaging member and your posts will achieve better visibility.
Young businesses and start-ups: When you are in the early stages, you’ll need to invest a lot of time setting up your social media accounts correctly and attracting valuable followers.
Established companies with little or no social media traction: If you recognise that your social media accounts are not performing the way you want them to be and you’re not achieving your goals now is the time to identify what isn’t working. Investing a lot of time on creating a new strategy will help you save time in the long run.
Businesses with typically over 1000 followers and engagement is continually good: Congratulations, your hard work has paid off and you’ve a lot of valuable followers. You can spend a lot less time looking at ways to grow your account as this will now come naturally. By publishing content your followers want to see, you will naturally attract welcomed engagement and gain shares.
The time spent growing your audiences and tweaking your engaging content until you get it right will always pay off. The more you do now, the less you’ll need to do once you have achieved the followers which are right for your business.
Have your business strategy and objectives in front of you. Think about what you are actually doing on social media – does this activity fit in with your overall strategy and are you achieving your objectives. If not, change it so it’s the perfect fit to help you achieve a good return on investment.
Time Management Tips for Social Media
To avoid overload and burnout here are my social media time management tips:
1. Post at least once a week. Don’t wait until the end of a month, panic a little, and bombard your accounts with posts. You will only be rewarded with good visibility if you are consistent; posting content little and often is good practice.
2. Check that you are using the right platform for your business objectives. Ask yourself why you are using a particular platform – if this isn’t where your ideal customers are hanging out then you’ll be wasting your time. Knowing your objectives will help you make this decision – if you are wanting to raise awareness of an issue or needing business leads – you should check your analytics and look over your customer research – it could be that you need to concentrate on just one or two platforms instead of trying to do all of them.
3. Ensure that your settings are optimised. When your settings are correct your posts will do so much better than if you’ve neglected this area. Getting your settings right is to build a firm foundation for your posts and ultimate growth – with poor foundations it will be almost impossible to achieve your objectives.
4. Don’t get distracted when on social media! Yes, I know this is easier said than done, but when you discipline yourself not to click on a link to see a video of a cute puppy or check out your neighbour’s holiday snaps you’ll have more time to spend on you and your business. Leave the distractions until business is over for the day and you can relax and enjoy the more fun side of social media later.
Let’s Get Planning
Once you are confident that your settings have been optimised and you are on the right platforms, you can now concentrate on getting your content right.
Set some time aside every week to think about your posts. Ensure you are in a good mindset to do this and not rushing with other tasks. Blocking time out in advance with a clear head will save you lots of time.
My Case Study
I’d like to finish this blog by telling you about the time when I worked as Marketing Manager for Nomad Games and to answer my most asked question, ‘how much time does it take to grow a following on social media?’
Nomad Games develop video games, they basically turn board games into digital ones. One of my objectives was to increase sales through their social media channels.
They’d been stuck in a rut for a couple of years and only had 500 followers on YouTube and weren’t getting much traction on Instagram, Twitter or Facebook either. It was time for a Becs Bate review!
YouTube. It was clear that a change in strategy was needed; the constant promotional videos just weren’t doing it for their followers. I posted different content – content I knew the customers wanted to see. This included livestreams of the games and development content. In 3 months, the number of followers had doubled and continued to grow as the engagement levels increased. Posting livestreams took a lot less time to make than the well-crafted promotional videos – win win!
Twitter. This was a new platform for the company. Again, I knew many of their customers would be using this platform, so it made sense to use it. To launch a new account dedicated to a new card game I spent an hour a day purely focussing on its growth. I set a target to achieve 1000 new followers in 3 months, this target was met and after the 3 months I only needed to tweet up to 3 times a week to continue its growth.
Facebook. Before I joined the Nomad team, the content on Facebook was very salesly and the art-team were spending so much time crafting these amazing posts. I took the decision to post more raw footage, footage that is inexpensive and quick to produce. The followers enjoyed seeing what the team were up to and became more receptive to the salesy posts when they appeared.
Instagram. I spent some time researching the hashtags and made changes to them. With the correct hashtags in place the followers began to grow. If you want help with Instagram hashtags watch my YouTube video for inspiration!
Pinterest. Just like Twitter, this was new to the company. I dedicated an hour every day for two months to build it up and interact with other people’s Pinterest pages in the target sector. This time paid off as after 12 months, we were achieving over 500k views every month. This resulted in the platform being the third biggest referral mechanism to our website, yet it was the newest social platform with the least amount of followers.