6 time-saving social media ideas

One issue that comes up time and again when I talk to clients and connections about social media and blogging is time.

People – already stretched – don’t have time – especially for something they see as very labour intentive and without tangible, or measurable, benefits.

If that’s the case for your business or organisation, you need to find ways to manage it so it doesn’t become a burden and a chore.

These six social media ideas may help:

Use a scheduling tool such as Hootsuite or Buffer to schedule posts in advance. This doesn’t mean you lose the spontaneity of tweeting and updating and reacting in the moment, it just means that you set aside half an hour or an hour a week to ensure that you share some regular updates every day. These scheduling tools enable you to share and monitor all your channels on one dashboard, which makes social media far easier to manage.
Create a list of timeless tweets which can be shared at any time. These might be links to blogs and articles, thought leadership, promotional tweets, quotes and pictures. Having a list means you are not re-inventing the wheel every time you post.
Create social media and blog content calendars, so you know what you are sharing when, ensuring consistency and regularity – both important if you want to engage and grow your following.
Share the load. If you have a small team, assign responsibility for monitoring and live posting on social media to a different person each day, so the burden doesn’t always fall to the same person.
Make sure you have a regular flow of fresh content by having a blog. Aim to blog regularly, ideally once a week, but once a month may be more easily achieved. Asking every person in your team to contribute again shares the load – if you have a team of 12, that means they only have to write a blog once a year. This also helps to keep your blog fresh and interesting. Holding regular brainstorms for content ideas will help to give your bloggers guidance on what to right about.
Repurpose existing content into blog posts – press releases, case studies, answers to queries from clients. One charity I recently trained was concerned they had nothing to blog, but had hundreds of case studies collected for their annual report which could provide them with years of content.

In summary, the best way to manage your social media is to be as organised as possible and to share the load. This may involve “frontloading” your work as you create your systems and processes in the first place, but in the long-run it will pay dividends as it makes day to day management far easier.