Using Social Media As Your Marketing Strategy

Using Social Media for marketing is an accepted and expected trend, where small business’s can further their reach to more customers. Used to promote your business, services, interests or anything that could be related to earning income in one way or another.

Social Media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Google plus, and YouTube (just to name a few) help to make the process simple by allowing you to get to know your customers and prospects in ways that were previously not possible.

Why do you need to have a social media account for your business?

• Reach potential customers worldwide
• Learn what your customers are thinking
• Reach your target market
• Gain credibility
• Search Engine Visibility
• Networking

You will need a good social media marketing plan in place to keep your customer’s interests and needs front of mind. If practiced correctly, marketing with Social Media Marketing can bring outstanding success to your business or brand.

So it goes without saying, if you’re not using a social media marketing plan already, you’ll have to learn it – or lose out in the long run.

Making it simple

You will need to invest some time and energy into managing your social media presence and content, but social media doesn’t have to control your work schedule.

Here are 5 quick tips to improve your social media productivity, to stop it eating into your day…

1. Make Your To-Do List the day before.

On the day before make a detailed to do list for your social media efforts.

When you plan out what you’re going to do the day before, you’ll be able to get right to it, first thing in the morning, or whenever best suits you. This will free yourself up for the rest of the day so you can be more productive.

Could possibly help you sleep better too, (because you’ve got it sorted!) which certainly helps with productivity.

2. Automate Scheduling

Automating your social media plan can take several hours out of your day, and cut it down to about 30 minutes, or less, per day. Automating allows you to use your time more wisely so you don’t find yourself doing repetitive social media marketing tasks throughout you workday.

Social Media Automation tools like Hootsuite or Buffer allow you to pre-schedule your posts as well as post to multiple platforms. These tools also let you manage all of your social media accounts in one place. Another great automation tool is Social Oomph.

I love the functionality of these sites and it certainly gets the job done. The best thing is you can get started for free. Many of these platforms, let you automate 1 site for free, which is great because you can try them out to find the one that best suits your needs.

3. Content Curation

Content Curation simply means finding, collecting, and sharing existing content with your social media followers.

Content Curation helps you build an audience by finding great ‘quality’ pieces of content to share with them. This will show your readers that you wish to be a valuable source of information for them, (their go-to source) which will help in getting more interaction, and likely cause more shares and gain more followers.

There are many content curation tools that will help in your search for the best content to share on social media, a few of them being…

Feedly:  A popular RSS reader, lets you choose your preferred sources for content.

Pocket: Installs easily in your browser (or in a smart phone app) and keeps all your interesting images or articles in one place for your reference.

Scoop.it:  Will send you a daily update of the topics you follow to keep pace with the most relevant articles to share.

Choose a tool that suits your needs and reduce the time and effort you invest in your social media activities. Also make sure to share on a regular basis, as sharing regularly and frequently gains you the most visibility.

4. Dedicate a Time to Respond to Your Readers

It’s very important to respond to comments, and most people who ask a question or post a comment on your social media page expect a response within 24 hours… any longer can discourage them from future interactions.

Devote certain times of the day to responding to and engaging with your online community, and be consistent. Find out what times you get the best engagement and focus on twice a day for your social media reponses.

For a small business, I’d set aside about 5 minutes in the morning and late afternoon to check any feedback on social media.

Tip: If you have global readers who engage at odd times, consider posting the times you are available for immediate response.

5. Analyze Your Social Media Strategy

You will never really know how compelling your social media marketing efforts are, unless you take the time to analyze your results. Through analyzing, you can see which of your strategies are working, and which ones aren’t.

Measure your success with Google Analytics, or a Social Media Management Tool like Buffer, which has great analytics features.

Analyzing allows you to focus on the social networks that are working for you, so you don’t waste time on the one that don’t.

Got another tip to add to this list on how to improve your social-media productivity? Share it in the comments section below.