When it comes to social media, the majority of small to medium-sized businesses are doing it all wrong. Either they spend way too much time on it or no time on it at all.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. You can be a key player on social media without devoting large portions of your daily routine to it. And this is important for two major reasons:
You can’t not be social. If you won’t be, then your competition sure as heck will be.
You can’t invest hours into being social. At the end of the day, social media is about building a presence and increasing awareness, not keeping your doors open for business.
Below are a few helpful suggestions when it comes to being socially smart and managing that delicate balance between being social and being tied to social media.
Buffer
It’s important not to spend a whole lot of your workday meandering through the various social platforms—signing in, signing out, signing back in, posting, searching, tagging, liking, and so on and so forth. This is why Buffer is a great tool for companies who aren’t like Target and aren’t going to devote an entire social media team to creating separate marketing campaigns specifically for each individual social platform. That’s way too much work.
With Buffer, you can create one post and automatically ask it to upload onto all of your connected platforms simultaneously. You can share a post immediately or schedule it to go out to your followers on a specific day. What’s really great about Buffer is that you can take an hour out of one day to schedule an entire month of social media posts at once. And whether you want to include links, photos, videos, or just content, the choice is yours—Buffer can do it all.
Buffer also provides analytics and insight into all of your posts: how many clicks, likes, shares, and comments your posts receive. It connects with Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Google+, and Twitter. And if you have more than one business or would like to post on behalf of yourself or another person, you can add multiple profiles to your account.
Social Media Calendar
What good is Buffer without strategic content to back it up? Not that great…which is why you need a social media calendar.
It doesn’t have to be very fancy and you can always find a free, downloadable template on the internet, but a social media calendar will help you strategically implement your content. Anything that resembles a calendar with clearly labeled days will do just fine. Simply insert content and links into each day, and then copy and paste this into a tool like Buffer when you’re complete. Seeing content for 30 days at a time will show you the bigger picture. Make sure your days of content all tie into each other and if your content as a whole promotes your brand identity.
If you keep these two tips in mind, it should be significantly easier and drastically less time-consuming for you to handle your social media platforms. Just keep in mind: socially smart.