f you aren’t careful, your social media marketing can and will take up a massive amount of time. There is always someone you should be engaging with and something that you should be posting.
On top of that, there’s always more channels your brand should be on.
How do you manage your social media without it consuming all of your time?
Read on to find out where to start.
CHOOSE YOUR CHANNELS
The first order of business is choosing which channels your brand will be on. While it may be nice to think that your brand can be on every social media website you can think of, it is imperative to select a handful to focus on initially.
But how do you choose?
One very easy way to choose the social networking channels you want to focus on is to look at your website traffic.
If you go to your Google Analytics page, then dive into Acquisition and then Social. From there, click into network referrals.
Here, you’ll be able to see where most of your traffic comes from.
You can look at weekly or monthly numbers, but for this exercise, I would look at yearly numbers. See what networks have driven the most traffic overall for the last year or so.
Look at each network. Are you getting referrals from networks that you aren’t even on? Maybe you want to be on those social networking sites.
PRIORITIZE
You can also use this exercise to guide your priorities. Are you not getting much traffic from Twitter, but are spending a large amount of your time on it?
Maybe you want to shift your focus and focus more on Facebook or Instagram because they’re topping the charts as some of the largest drivers of traffic.
PROMOTE YOUR ORIGINAL CONTENT
Determine how you want to share your original content. Do you want to promote a piece of your own content every day? Or maybe you see that you get the most traffic at 9 am on a Tuesday morning.
You want to plan out the adequate sharing of your content because often marketers focus too much on creating content, and not enough time distributing the content.
Here at HIPB2B, we originally shared our content three times on the day that it was published.
There were a couple of major disadvantages to this:
- Our Twitter feed was repetitive
- Our content only got shared once before being buried
We started sharing content on a staggered schedule. Each blog post would be shared on the day of publish, then a week after, two weeks after, and four weeks after. We now schedule these posts via Buffer.
This staggered schedule means that our content sees the light of social for longer than the single-day share. You might want to consider doing something similar.
DON’T FORGET ABOUT CONTENT CURATION
Content curation is incredibly important for a social media strategy. Once you’ve worked out a weekly sharing schedule for your branded content, consider the spaces in between.
Content curation makes you a better digital citizen. You share the content of others, giving them more shares, views, likes, etc.
This kind of interaction is what makes social media work. If everyone was just pushing out only their content, you lose the social aspect of social media.
Here at HIPB2B, we combine two methods for our sharing. We use a blend of:
- Retweets and reshares — we reshare content on social networks on our two non-publish days to build our brand and share the best work we find on those social media networks. By doing this, other brands get a boost in their share numbers, and we get to show off our amazing content.
- Constructing our own shares using curated content — we make our own tweets, LinkedIn, and Facebook posts using the content of others. A key here is tagging the brand who created the content, so they still get the credit and the notification about it. Our brand gets the advantage of having good taste in other’s content.
This blend works for us when combined with our own content.
RESPOND AND ENGAGE
For your brand to be successful on social media, you must be truly social.
Write up a schedule for following/unfollowing, liking, commenting, and replying to others on your social media network.
When it comes to others commenting on your posts or sharing them, try to do this daily. It makes your brand look good to be extra responsive.
As you sift through social media to find what you want to share, don’t forget to like and comment on stuff that fits in your brand’s niche. You’ll find that your brand does better in social algorithms if it acts like an actual user of social media.
PULLING IT ALL TOGETHER
Now, take all these ideas and put them together.
- Select a channel. This should be the channel that is already driving the most traffic for your brand, or where you see your direct competitors doing very well.
- Determine how much content you create a week.
- Determine how many times a week you want to share your content. Consider resharing older content in addition to your new publishes to promote greater variety and extend the life of your content.
- Determine when and how many times you want to share the content of others. This is based on the empty space in between where you aren’t sharing your own content. Consider creating a blend of both reshares and original posts that share the content of others. This creates variety.
- Use a social media scheduling tool to schedule as much content as possible in advance. This will free up your time.
- Engage, engage, engage — engagement is a two-way street. If you want others to engage with you, you must engage with them.
Rinse and repeat for each of your channels. From there, create a list of all the social sharing that needs to happen on every channel for a given week.
Depending on the magnitude of the list, you may need to delegate tasks amongst your team.
Remember, social media marketing can be an entire job. Be sure to take on only what you and your team have the bandwidth for. There is no reason to try to do everything and end up doing it in a mediocre manner.
Take on what you can, keep organized, and make changes slowly. That’s the only way you’ll be able to run a successful social media strategy.
