Digital marketers often argue about the value of social media marketing, whether it offers enough return on investment to be worth the time it is necessary to devote to it. It can be hard to measure, which is why some brands are reluctant to devote many resources to it.
Even if you can’t get a precise measure of the ROI of social media campaigns, what you can do is be more efficient and effective in the time you spend on it. Here are 9 easy ways to manage your brand’s social presence without it taking over the entirety of your working day:
- Set up a listening station. A tool like Social Mention will report back to you whenever your brand is mentioned online, so you can research what people are saying about your brand and how it is perceived without having to do any extra work.
- Use scheduling tools. Scheduling tools, such as Hootsuite for example, are essential in helping small businesses manage their social media posts. You can schedule weeks in advance, freeing up time for other tasks.
- Drop some platforms. Trying to do too much is a classic social media marketing mistake. If you’re plugging away on Instagram, Pinterest or Tumblr and not getting much interest, your time and energy could be better spent by ditching these and focusing on the key platforms where you’re starting to get noticed.
- Find followers using tools. It’s easy to lose hours on Twitter trying to find the relevant people and organisations to follow, but tools such as Followerwonk can make it easy.
- Consider paid advertising. Paid promotions such as sponsored posts on Facebook can be relatively affordable, but they save you a lot of time. If you want to promote an event or a product, a sponsored post will keep popping up in your customer’s timelines, saving you from having to continually re-post to hold their attention.
- Make social media-friendly images quickly. On social media, images rule. Rather than spending hours making a shareable graphic for your latest promotion, use a tool such as Canva to make one quickly and easily. Tools like this have templates for every platform and format imaginable, so you can hit the ground running.
- Need content? Don’t search for it yourself. Finding interesting content to share with your followers can take you on a search across the whole of the web, losing you hours at a time. Find shareable content more quickly using tools such as Scoop.It, a free content curation tool.
- Be consistent across all platforms. Creating different types of content for each social media platform is time-consuming and hard to manage. Users actually prefer a consistent approach and message from brands, so save yourself some time and stick to one message, theme or graphic across all platforms.
- Focus on adding value. You could spend lots of time scheduling endless posts and updates that don’t ever really say anything, or you could ditch the spam and post less but focus on more valuable, interesting content.
How do you stop social media marketing taking over your whole life? Please feel free to share your tips and tools.
