Social Marketing – 5 Time Saving Tips

You know you need to be using social marketing, but finding the time in your busy working day can be a challenge.

Here’s 5 tips to help you:-

Set a schedule

Don’t feel under pressure to post every day. The most important thing is that when you do post it should be quality content that will get a response. Your messages should be purely promotional. The occasional promotional message is fine, but it should be part of an overall mix of content which includes, images, information about your industry and your personal thoughts.

Build a back catalogue of material.

It’s hard to sit down and think of fresh content every time you want to make a post. Instead, why not schedule some time each week to come up with ideas you could talk about. This will enable you to come up with material for several posts at a time, which you can then post a few days apart.

Link Your Accounts

These days, most businesses have several social media accounts. You don’t have to find unique content for each account. Just focus on one account, then link the other ones so that anything you post is distributed to all of them. For example anything you posted on Facebook could be sent out on Twitter and likewise anything that you post on Twitter could be posted on your Facebook page.

Use social marketing to provide customer service

Are there frequently asked questions or queries about your business? You can use social marketing to provide the answers. So when you receive a common question, you can point them towards your Facebook page and also ask them to like your page.

Don’t worry about negative comments; use them as an opportunity to showcase your customer service excellence by working with the customer to resolve the situation in an open way. Other clients, potential clients will be impressed with the way that you helped the client.

Automate (but with care)

Once you have enough variety of content you should be able to schedule some of it to be posted at specific times of the day. (There are some tools for this such as Timely for Twitter or Socialoomph). However, Social media means being social and you still need to have conversations with people and be human.

Centralise your engagement

There are a number of social media platform tools out there that allow you to centralise  your social marketing accounts in one place, Hootsuite, and Tweetdeck are just two examples. These social media tools let you update, monitor, manage and maintain several social media platforms at once saving you precious time.

Have content come to you.

You can set up Google alerts for specific topics related to your industry or niche. If you are an accountancy firm set up an alert for “accountancy advice”. You can then take a look at some of the results and it should inspire you to generate some content which you can share in your posts.

There are so many things you have to do as a business owner today, but building your brand online and being talked about is one of things you absolutely have to do. Social marketing for small business is hugely important and can really help business growth!