How much time should a professional marketer spend on Social Media each day? An hour? Several hours? All morning? All Day? Never, ever get off? It’s a challenge that all social media interactors face; leveraging time into clicks/visitors/sales. While there’s no hard and fast equation that guarantees the best results, and there is no shortcut to sincere human reaction with customers and consumers, the experts have come up with five known ways to keep social media time down to a reasonable level each day and still be productive — so things like family, hobbies, vacations, and even sleep, can still be attended to.
Platform priorities
Researchers say over 2.7 billion active searchers are on a social media platform at any given time. Wouldn’t it be great to reach all of them at once? Great, sure — but also impractical unless there’s a staff of dozens working on it each day. Most companies and marketers don’t have the means to do that, so it boils down to finding out which platforms are the most effective in bringing in customers and increasing sales. A thorough examination of all platform analytics will reveal which ones are providing steady results, and which ones are non-starters. Don’t be afraid to thin out the platforms that are not performing well, or at all. Websites don’t need any sympathy or forgiveness — if they work, great; keep ‘em. If they don’t work; don’t spend an extra second worrying over them; just cut ‘em loose. Just a reminder; while Facebook now has more than half of all social media viewers at any one time, recent Congressional investigations and public backlash may push Facebook way down in a matter of months. In other words; don’t put all your social media eggs in one basket.
Hootsuite
One of the most time-consuming activities for a marketer and/or a customer service rep is answering the many questions and comments that come in on all of the different social media platforms available. This can literally take all day. So use Hootsuite to track brand mentions, respond to direct messages, and generally keep everything that goes through your landing page on one page. According to LincolnLabs, “This will reduce both response time and increase efficiency to levels that require just minutes of time, not hours, each day.”
Feedly
Compiling all the relevant content to share in-house and to customers and consumers is another iceberg waiting to sink your schedule and your free time. So use Feedly. Their basic services are free. They are also experts at curating material so it can be recycled later on — thus avoiding reinventing the wheel. And they cross index with other quality content for later reference. Let smart programs do the clerical work; humans don’t need to bother with it anymore.
Batching
Batching customer email and consumer queries is the smart way to save time. Do it once a week and then spend just five minutes on email and other queries the other four days in the work week. There are a dozen or more mobile apps available for this procedure, so it can be done on the run — at the airport, the coffee shop, during the commute, etc.
Along with batching is rescheduling, or recycling, content. Many times a particular piece of content on a blog site or on Facebook or Reddit is so good, and so timely, that it should not be archived right away, but also rescheduled to run again in the near future. This is not a vanity ploy; it’s very pragmatic. After all, not everyone saw the post the first time it ran — so running it again in another two weeks is making wise use of content resources and using reiteration to drive home the main selling points of a product and/or service.
There’s also the matter of automated linkage from Twitter. Surprisingly, many marketers and advertising agencies still don’t see the need to run links to all their content as tweets. This can be programmed in less than a half hour, and then every single piece of content that is produced and posted will also have a tweeted link. It’s just as easy as that — maybe that’s why some marketers still put off doing it . . .
Buffer
A master automated scheduler like Buffer is a real time saver. Busy marketers who stop to think about how much time they spend just scheduling appointments and meetings are aghast at the wasted time — time that could be spent with clients and with teams to advance the current agenda. It calculates which hours are the busiest on the social media platforms you use the most, and makes sure premium content is prominently displayed at such times.
The reason most people get into marketing is because it’s a fast-paced and exciting career. So don’t let the quotidian chores that go with any job become time consuming headaches. Working smarter frees more time for the essential creativity that’s needed for great marketing campaigns.
