Time saving social media tips - Patch

Time saving social media tips

bywp_patch
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Social media community management for a brand can be time-consuming, frustrating, boring, tiring and difficult yet some make it seem so effortless. It’s not enough to post a few Tweets and hope for the best, but in the same regard, most brands can’t afford a social media team and have to do the best they can with as little time as possible.

True social media success comes from time spent, well, doing social media. Time spent on engagement, time spent thinking about your audience and how best to appeal to them, time researching the things they care about, developing a content strategy and knowing how to publish the content to get maximum exposure and most importantly, just being social in your online industry community. But don’t let that put you off or worry that managing your brand’s social media is going to take up too much time: we’ve shared our top time-saving tips so you can get your life back, and stop starting at a blank screen trying to come up with tomorrow’s Tweet.

Plan ahead

Create a calendar with key industry events, relevant national days and monthly themes. This will ensure you don’t miss anything that could help you gain exposure to a wider audience and make your content writing process much easier.

Write in bulk

Once you get your creative juices flowing, don’t stop at one post. If you are writing quality content, keep going. This will save you time in the long run as you won’t be spending ten minutes each day writing content in a hurry and you can focus on real time content and engaging with your audience. Equally, if you’re experiencing ‘writer’s block’ or having a bad content day, don’t force it. It’s quality over quantity.

Schedule your posts

This way you don’t have to login to each platform you use every time you want to share content on social media – you can adapt the post to suit the platform and send it out to all at once or even better, schedule in bulk for the week or month ahead. There are many social media scheduling tools available, including Buffer, SEMRush or Hootsuite – each one has different benefits, so be sure to find the right one for you.

Create Twitter lists

Use lists to easily find people who you want to engage with, monitor or who inspire you. This could be your target audience, clients, competitors or industry influencers. 

Set a time for engagement

You can’t be on social media all day engaging with everyone, but you should spend time engaging at least once a day. Set some time aside every day to be on each platform you use and engage with your target audience, clients and industry influencers. Set a reoccurring reminder to make sure you don’t forget: engagement is the most important element of any social media plan.

Like other people’s posts, join a discussion, share other people’s content and post some comments. Being engaging doesn’t just help you stand out, it increases the chances that your posts will be served to the people you’ve engaged with.

Reuse and recycle evergreen content

Don’t post the same content every week as this will become boring and people won’t pay attention to what you’re saying, but if you have a brilliant blog with a topic your audience wants to learn about, do show off that blog more than once. For example, if it has five tips on it, that’s five different posts you can use throughout the month. Remember, not every audience member will be served your posts every time you post them, so if you think it’s interesting enough you can post it again. 

Create on-brand and powerful graphics – quickly

There are lots of tools out there that can help you create graphics that stand out in the crowd without paying for a graphic designer. For example, Canva has the ability to save your brand palette, logo and even allows you to upload a font if it isn’t one they already provide. You can also use templates for inspiration and resize posts to fit all your platforms.

We’re Patch, a digital and social media marketing agency in Kent, UK.

At Patch, our approach to social media management focuses on quality content and engagement levels to help our clients build an engaged following by providing value.

Get in touch to find out more and get started on that winning social strategy with a team of industry experts!