Twitter, and Facebook, and Pinterest – Oh My! Create a Successful Social Media Strategy That You Can Execute in Just Minutes a Day
by Josette Millar
You want to delve into the world of social media but you want to do it contentiously. Creating a strong social media strategy that focuses on attracting attention, increasing your branding efforts, and converting customers doesn’t have to take hours, weeks, or months, it can be accomplished in just minutes each day. Before losing yourself down the rabbit hole of social media, use these tips to maximize your impact on social media and minimize your time.
Check With Your Competitors
With the array of social media sites, figuring out which will benefit your business most can be a challenge. Researching which social media sites your competitors frequent can be a helpful way to identify which niche social media sites your customers use. Book publishers, for example, have found that creating Tumblr accounts for their authors drives sales because their readers enjoy seeing upcoming book covers and character sketches. While Twitter, Facebook, and Google Plus are a no-brainer when developing a social media strategy, delving into niche social media markets may yield big rewards.
Automate Your Posts
Reaching out to your audience on a daily or weekly basis is required for an effective social media strategy but devoting time each day to each separate social media site is not a necessity. Automating your social media updates is a simple way to ensure your customers are getting up-to-date information and you are spending less time fiddling with each site. Whether you use a pre-made WordPress template or a personalized website, work with your webmaster to ensure that each blog post is automatically transmitted to your social media accounts.
In that same vein, utilizing a service that allows you to schedule social media updates is a great way to limit time on various social media sites. Services like Gremln, Hootsuite, and DoShare, offer social media users the ability to schedule updates weeks or months in advance, ensuring that their fans are getting consistent content. Set aside an hour or two each week to create social media updates and schedule them throughout the week.
Limit Your Involvement
Developing a social media strategy is a necessity for businesses who want to keep relevant but often, business owners overestimate the involvement needed to run an effective strategy. While setting up social media accounts and keeping them updated does require some time, it doesn’t require hours each week. Rather than effectively using their time, they end up wasting time reading content, altering settings, and chasing “leads” that go nowhere. Setting clear boundaries about how much time you will devote to each site and sticking to that limit is imperative in running an effective social media strategy that doesn’t eat into other duties and responsibilities.
Don’t be Afraid to Cut Bait
No matter how minimal your involvement, wasting time on a social media site that doesn’t convert customers or attract new business is a time waste. Developing a clear social media strategy with specific goals and milestones can help business owners understand what sites work and which don’t. When you identify a site that isn’t reaching those goals, stop spending time on it. Default to automated blog updates and move on to greener pastures.
If you want to spend only minutes a day and still have a successful social media presence, you need to do some front end work. Finding the right social media sites to reach your fans, setting up each account to automatically update with new blog posts, and creating a strict schedule for devoting time to social media are just a few steps that must be taken to create a minutes-a-day social media presence.