In the US alone, social networking is ranked as the top online activity, with one typical American allotting 37 minutes per day on social media websites (according to Go Gulf). In addition to that, Global Web Index revealed that 28% of the average online users’ time in the general population, is spent in social media.
The numbers are quite staggering, aren’t they?
Of course, since everyone believes in this chain of thought, “where your customers are, there you should also be”, it just makes perfect sense for business owners and marketers to just jump in the social media bandwagon.
However, despite how mouth-watering the prospect of marketing via the different social media channels might seem, not everyone are getting great results from it – mainly because they get distracted.
In fact, according to an article published at Contentbistro, social media is pretty much their number 1 source of distraction for solopreneurs and business owners.
Have you ever gone to Facebook with the hopes of pre-marketing your new product, only to end up getting distracted watching videos of Stephen Curry’s godlike crossover moves? Or you ended up watching on of Gary Vaynerchuk’s motivational videos, perhaps?
Friends, the problem is real.
If you’re struggling with getting things done while on social media and are looking for ways to be more productive while on the platform, then you’re on the right place.
Allow me to share with you 5 tips that can help you with just that.
Let’s hop right in.
1. Understand your goals.
Remember that in any business, you can’t afford to play pin the tail on the donkey.
The reason why most companies succeed at using social media is that they have clear-cut goals of what they want to do. In most cases, every single step was thoroughly planned out before they were executed. By having clear goals in mind, you are taking ambiguity and the role of chances out of the equation.
You can start by answering these questions:
- Who is your target audience?
- What step was thoroughly planned out and what does your target audience want to know and need to know?
- What should your content look like?
- What are the biggest problems they are dealing with?
- How can you give solution to these problems?
These are just some of the many questions that you can ask when crafting your social media marketing gameplan.
Once you have the core steps planned out, all you need to do is just stick to it so you can avoid reacting to every single thing that comes to your social media profile’s news feed.
2. Work on your tasks in batches.
Time is a resource that is highly valued, and if it is exhausted without you yielding any kind of productive results, it would definitely cost you a lot.
When you have tons of things to do on your checklist, you attempt to switch from one task to another in order to get things done the soonest time possible.
Well. Guess what?
Our brains aren’t made for multitasking, and this article will tell you why.
Batching things up means allotting time for a specific cluster or type of goals/agenda first before proceeding to work on other goals. Simply stated, you do things by batch. This technique will help you get your goals in order, eliminate distractions, and schedule ahead of time.
That being said, I suggest that you categorize your tasks and work by following these tips:
- Prepare your draft of posts or a POST BANK so that it‘ll be convenient for you to just pull them out when the time calls for new posts. Thanks to Facebook’s features, you can schedule posts ahead of time or save drafts:
Time is a resource that is highly valued, and if it is exhausted without you yielding any kind of productive results, it would definitely cost you a lot.
When you have tons of things to do on your checklist, you attempt to switch from one task to another in order to get things done the soonest time possible.
Well. Guess what?
Our brains aren’t made for multitasking, and this article will tell you why.
Batching things up means allotting time for a specific cluster or type of goals/agenda first before proceeding to work on other goals. Simply stated, you do things by batch. This technique will help you get your goals in order, eliminate distractions, and schedule ahead of time.
That being said, I suggest that you categorize your tasks and work by following these tips:
- Prepare your draft of posts or a POST BANK so that it‘ll be convenient for you to just pull them out when the time calls for new posts. Thanks to Facebook’s features, you can schedule posts ahead of time or save drafts:
- Follow peak hours. Web users are more active in specific hours of the day. You can learn more about this by checking out Neil Patel’s infographic.
- Understand which posts are timely and which are not. The point here is to make your product relevant to your customers given the seasons or the trends.
3. Create a content calendar.
Some companies stay active for a period of time and the next thing you know, they’re off-the-grid in social media. A content calendar helps keep you committed. That way, you remain consistent and you won’t have any excuses.
According to Forbes writer Pamela Springer, “For your social media marketing plan to succeed, it’s crucial that you consistently interact online; even if it’s just 10 minutes a day. If you can’t put in the time, it’s best not to start.”
Your content calendar can be as simple or as complicated as you want it to be. The important thing is that you create one and follow it.
It should contain the plot of your posts, the corresponding dates as to when you want to publish them, include the themes for your posts (among others). Feel free to add other details like specific time of publishing, which social media platform to use and respective purposes of posting.
Important note: If there’s one thing that I really like about using content calendars, it would be that I have a bird’s-eye-view of how my ideas would flow. This helps me polish the message that I am trying to convey on each post giving my updates consistency and more focus.
4. Measure your results.
You can plan all you want, hypothesize all you want, brain storm all you want, but at the end of the day, you’ll never really know how effective your social media marketing efforts are, unless you take the time to measure your results.
Through measuring, you can tell which of your strategies are working, and which ones aren’t.
Once you’ve obtained the hard cold numbers proving to you which of your strategies are bringing you results, you can then scrap the ones that aren’t. Then allocate the budget to those that are working – or to new campaigns that you’d like to try out.
This ensures that your effort isn’t wasted on marketing methods that aren’t working.
If you aren’t used to tracking your results and are hoping to start now, then I’d like to warn you that there are several pitfalls that you just might fall into. One is focusing on vanity metrics like the number of views on your post, when what you should be focusing on are the number of actions like shares, comments, engagements, etc…
There is more to measuring results than simply crunching or analyzing the numbers, while there are several blog posts that you can read to learn more about it, I urge you to go for several online courses so the kind of learning you’ll acquire is something that is more in depth.
Simply reading one blog post to another can cause confusion since there might be inconsistencies between what the authors are imparting. Let alone the fact that some publishers aren’t as careful with the tips they share compared to those who really take the time to create an in depth course on a certain topic.
5. Automate your tasks.
Just because social media sites run 24/7 doesn’t mean you have to be online 24/7.
You can automate a good number of your social media tasks by simply using plugins or even free apps.
For example, if you have a website and are regularly publishing blog posts, then you don’t have to manually share the article that you published on your website across the different social media platforms. If your website is powered by WordPress, then you can customize your website’s sharing options by going to your dashboard, “settings”, then “sharing”.
Important tip – There are others tasks that you can automate aside from getting your published articles on your website shared on your social media profiles. There are free tools that you can use to pull content from reputable sites like Forbes.com, Entrepreneur.com, and Inc.com (among others), so that everytime these websites publish something, it’ll automatically be shared on your profiles without you doing anything.
