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By: Lisa Wozniak
Social media is an amazing approach to marketing that has helped countless numbers of businesses, nonprofits and medical professionals grow their business and increase their exposure. With so many platforms to choose from that appeal to so many different demographics it can leave many feeling like the world is their oyster as they dream of the exposure that their business will receive as they try to welcome the enormous crowds at the door. Wonderful dream, right?
It’s true that social media can absolutely give your business great exposure through the variety of platforms, advertising, email campaigns and blog posts. However, it can quickly become overwhelming when you think about the time and effort it takes to post content to each of these sites. After all, research tells us that there are number of times per day (depending on your industry) that posts are necessary to capture the attention of your readers. [See blog post Frequency or Quality in Social Media Posting]
Seems like a pretty daunting task to get all of these posts completed timely doesn’t it? It will leave many with visions of being chained to their computers creating post after post and manually entering them into each of their social media platforms and then writing blog posts and posting them to individual social media platforms to keep their name and reputation in mainstream. It doesn’t take long for many small business owners to throw their hands up in exasperation. After all, they’re business owners; and who has time to spend the whole day just waiting around for the next post, comment or blog? They have a business to run, and all of the challenges that come along with that.
I’m here to tell you it’s ok; you can take a deep breath. There are six steps to juggling social media that can help to make this process easier and give you a bit more time in your already hectic day.
- If you could spend one day writing a few blog posts and keeping them stored and ready to go, it will take some stress out of your week. Better yet, you don’t have to do this all alone, this responsibility can be assigned to key staff members. Having a blog from a different perspective of your business can be a good thing for readers, your business and more importantly your sanity.
- As these blog posts are completed, you have the opportunity to proof read them and store them for the appropriate time to post them. Now you know, what is being posted and when which is relevant to the timing of your business.
- As these blog posts are loaded onto your blog site/website and scheduled for future dates, you have the ability to have them simultaneously sent to your social media sites as well, giving your social media followers the ability to stay current with your business.
- Pictures can be collected from royalty free sites like Pixabay and edited for your blogs or social media sites ahead of time with PicMonkey or Canva. This can also be given as a task to a member of your staff and reviewed by you. Now you will have graphics to go along with your posts at a moment’s notice.
- One of the best tools I’ve found for this kind of thing so far is Google Calendar. Because you can create multiple calendars for multiple projects and include schedules for each of your staff members, you can allow the calendars to overlap and see who is working on what in a given key stroke. Even if you are doing this all alone, keeping track of these tasks can make a difference between stress and victory.
- My absolute favorite ways of staying on top of social media is to use a post scheduler. There are several of them out there and many offer a free trial. Some of the best include Buffer, Hootsuite, Falcon Social, Drummer and Meet Edgar. These schedulers allow you to load and set times for all of your social media posts on each of your social media platforms with the attached pictures that you’ve collected and they will appear at their designated times. Some of these will even allow you to do this for several days at a time and also stay on top of likes, comments and shares from each of these platforms all on one screen.
These six steps to juggling social media can help even the busiest small business owner stay on top of the marketing that will grow their business. We’d love to hear what tools work for you. Please comment below and subscribe to these blogs.