4 Ways to Save Time on Social Media

4 Ways to Save Time with Social Media

Everybody knows social media can be a time sink. So finding ways to do it effectively, while saving time, is key! If you’re like most small business owners, you don’t have time to spend all day on your social media marketing.

But the thing is, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, and other social media platforms have become essential to your overall marketing plan. So if you want to have a presence on more than one or two accounts, it’s important to efficient as possible when it comes to posting your content. This allows you to spend more time being social with your followers, yet have enough time to devote to your business. These 4 ideas will help.

Make a Plan

If you wake up each morning and think, “what should I post today,” I guarantee you’re going to feel frustrated and overwhelmed. Instead, set up an editorial calendar; a plan of what you’re going to post and when. How you structure your editorial calendar should be based on your expertise and the type of content your followers want from you. If you need some ideas to get started with, you might want to piggyback on holidays or national observances. For example, September is National Service Dog Month. If you’re a dog trainer, and want to inform people about service dogs, schedule a series of blog posts, tweets, or other content about service dogs.

Regardless of what you post, having an editorial calendar will help keep you focused and on track. And having some of the overwhelm removed will make it more likely for you to be consistent with your social media efforts.

Post Evergreen Content

Evergreen content is content that is relevant over time. You read evergreen content all the time, and may not even know it. People will write blog posts and articles with information that doesn’t change over time. For example, the post you’re reading right now is evergreen content! Here are a few more:

• Reasons to hire a dog walker
• How to teach your dog to sit
• Why your cat may not use a littler box

Pet owners are constantly looking for this type of information, and a blog post about any one of these topics will be relevant for quite a long time. It’s not dependent on the date, like an event or news story might be. This means evergreen content can be promoted today, tomorrow, and beyond, which brings us to my next tip.

[clickToTweet tweet=”Evergreen content can be promoted today, tomorrow, and beyond. #repurposecontent” quote=”Evergreen content can be promoted today, tomorrow, and beyond.”]

Repurpose Content

Imagine you just wrote that blog post entitled ‘How to Teach a Dog To Sit.’ Use some of your key points for stand alone posts. For example, in that blog post you tell your readers, “When teaching your dog to sit, reward him immediately when he does so.” Add that great info to an eye-catching image and it can be a tweet, Facebook post, Instagram post, Instagram Story, Snapchat post, etc. With that one blog post, you’ve created content to use on your other social media accounts, without having to write brand new content.

Why not do a Facebook Live video as well? After you’re done, download the video, do a little editing, and upload it to your YouTube channel. You can also use the audio for a podcast. Here’s a post I did a post a while back with some ideas on how to repurpose your video content.

Schedule Posts

After you have a calendar of posts you have to find time to post them, right? It can be a total pain to have a list of posts for the day and then spend time posting them one by one. So rather than manually posting to your social media accounts one at a time, you’re able to schedule them in a queue so they post automatically. The result is more time to devote to other aspects of your business.

Here are just a few of the scheduling tools you may have heard of.

• Facebook scheduler
• Buffer
• HootSuite
• Post Planner
• Meet Edgar
• Smarter Queue

What time savers you use to stay on track with your social media marketing?