Managing Your Social Media Marketing Each Month

We understand firsthand how much time can go into running social media each day, week and month. We used to log in every single day to multiple platforms to create new posts, follow and share content from our community, and engage with our audience – all while still trying to run a business. Along the way, we learned a thing (or six) and are confident our social media management tips can help save you great time and hassle.

As a small business, you may not have anyone helping you with social media, which can make it feel like a daunting use of your time. We’re here to tell you that:

1. Social media is not a waste of time, and
2. There are many strategies you can put into place to better manage your social media accounts on a recurring basis.

Continue reading to see how to incorporate the following social media management tips into your marketing strategy.

Choosing the right social media platforms and doing away with the rest will save you a lot of time throughout the week, creating a more successful social media presence for your business.

You only need to be on the social media platforms where your target audiences go. How do you know what those are? First, you must fully understand your target audience — considering factors like age, gender, ethnicity, hobbies and interests. Then, you can research what platforms your audience uses by conducting some research via resources like Pew Research Center.

We recommend choosing 1-3 social media platforms so you can focus on posting only the best content and engaging with your audience, instead of trying to keep up with five different platforms each day.

Creating a content calendar will actually save you time in the long-run. Pick one day a week (we suggest Monday or Friday), choose the content that you want to share and write the accompanying copy. Taking this time will eliminate the need to scramble each day and figure out what to post. We got you covered if you need help setting up your social media calendar.

When creating your content calendar, you may get bogged down in curating good content that engages your audience. We recently put together a list of 30 social media content ideas that might make this an easier process. You can also use Tweetdeck to monitor streams of industry leaders, or an RSS reader, like Feedly, to keep up with marketing blogs and forums. Nuzzel is another tool that creates an email newsletter based on what your friends are engaging with on social media.

By automating your social media posts, you can stay active on social media, even on days when you are too busy to think about it.

With your calendar already created, it shouldn’t take much time to schedule your posts. Facebook and Twitter actually allow you to schedule posts straight from their platforms. For other platforms like Instagram, LinkedIn, and Pinterest, you need to use a publishing tool, like Buffer, which we use.

If you’re going to be on social media, then you might as well be genuine in your engagement. While it can same some time, we never recommend automating responses on social. Instead, set aside 5-10 minutes each day, or every other day, to respond to comments, messages and reviews, address concerns or bad experiences and to thank your audience for being engaged.

To spend your social media time wisely, make sure your posts meet your goals. Of course, if you haven’t already identified specific goals for your social media efforts (brand awareness, website traffic, sales, etc.) we highly recommend starting there. Then, set aside time and identify the right tools for analyzing your social media efforts on a monthly basis. Using Google Analytics, you can see the traffic your posts are generating and which platforms are performing the best. Some social media scheduling tools also include robust analytics.

Using these social media management tips should optimize your efforts on social media by making an otherwise overwhelming part of your job seem manageable. Using social media calendars, scheduling and monitoring tools will minimize the amount of time you spend on social media each day, week and month, and open up more time to spend on your other business goals.

If you’re still struggling to feel comfortable with your social media efforts, you can get in touch with us here. We exist to help you tell the very best version of your story, and we’d love to see if there’s anything we can do to help with your social media efforts. Cheers!