RODA marketing

How To Double Your Social Media RESULTS With Half the Effort in 3 Steps

Some people thrive doing it; some would rather stay out of it.  Yet, it’s almost unavoidable, and in some cases – essential.  Yes, we are talking about social media, this phenomenon that permeates almost every aspect of our lives in today’s world.

Being active on social media and being good at it can be a challenge.  If you are a startup, or a small team, chances are you are too busy with more pressing things to do than be on Twitter and check how many people engaged with your Facebook posts.

But we all know that social media is an important part of our lives, especially when it comes to business.  And we also know that we have to do it.

Knowing this, we might as well figure out the best ways to be more active on social media while spending less of our valuable time and with less effort.

Here are 3 techniques you can use – they have been proven to help you produce twice as much social media with half of the effort.   And another amazing thing about this approach – create higher output on social media and generally it produces a greater level of engagement!

 

1.  Create a Schedule

A lot of us are guilty of this: we unplug from one task to “quickly” post something to social media or to check how many more likes or comments we received.  Well, if you are doing this – you are doing yourself a serious disservice.

Instead, create a social media schedule and immediately reduce the level of consistent effort required throughout the day.

The fundamental advantage of social media is also its disadvantage.  To continuously maintain your presence and your brand message in front of people and at all times requires constant output and regular effort.

However, pausing on your current task to attend to your social media and then coming back to it actually wastes your time, plus it breaks your concentration.

It may only take a couple of minutes to post to social media, and you automatically want to do it repeatedly.  Well, you’ve just lost your train of thought on the task you were working on, and your momentum is gone.  So, what you though was not a big deal (just a couple of minutes interruption, so let’s do it repeatedly) – may require double that amount just to fully get back into the point where you left off.

Also, since every task has a cluster of other related tasks that require time, it all can easily amounts to a lot of wasted effort, especially if you’re not using a social media management tool, and need to retrieve passwords for your business Twitter, etc., accounts from an encrypted password file.

The scheduling approach involves handling your social media in a single session of unbroken concentration.

Firstly, set aside time to schedule your social media and try to allocate an hour (or two, or three) to deal exclusively with this.  Put it on your calendar and treat it like a must-do appointment!  See what works for you as far as how often you should do it; some people schedule dealing with their social media on a daily basis, while some – usually the highly-organized type – can get away with doing it once a week.

Now, during this time is when you schedule out your social media posts.  Using a tool, such as Buffer, schedule out all the messages that you want to post to your social media accounts and the exact times you want them posted.  Make sure you follow industry best practices for the best time of day to post.  By scheduling your posts you can produce two or three times as many posts – but it will take you a lot less time doing it.  So, why not produce six or so tweets to release throughout the day – in one go of about fifteen minutes?  You won’t need to unplug at six separate times and get distracted, diminishing your productivity.

Finally, allow some time in your schedule to monitor your social media metrics.  Constantly surfing in and out of social media is a big drain on your time, effort, and mental energies.  Rather than float around checking for possible RTs and Facebook likes or comments throughout the day, set some time each day or week to analyze your metrics.   This is the practice of social media listening, and will help you make business decisions based on what you find.

As you can see, scheduling your posts is a superior approach.

 

2.  Collect As You Go

Vertical Response, an American company providing software for sending email marketing, online surveys and direct mail for direct marketing campaigns, has found that the single-most time-consuming factor in social media management is “finding & posting content.”

One of the most important features of posting to social media – finding content to post – can be seriously time-consuming, yet, the amount of time and effort that you pour into it can be reduced.

 

Lidija Nov. 2

 

Create a collection system for social media content.

As you go about your day, checking emails, exploring websites, doing research, etc., you come across interesting articles, studies, or websites worth sharing.

That’s why you need a collection system – take the good content and distill it to a quick-and-easy process.

To achieve this, you can choose whichever system works for you.  Some people prefer Evernote, along with the Evernote Chrome extension; whenever you come across something interesting to post on social media, all you need to do is click the Evernote button in your browser and share later.

You can fine-tune how you want the content to be saved for future reference, by having different folders and sub-folders.

Again, time management is super important, so make sure you create a focused time for content discovery.

Be organized and schedule your posts, and with half the effort, you can produce double the content.

 

 3.  Share It More Than Once

A great way to get your message in front of a bigger audience and raise your brand awareness is to share the same stuff more than once – plus you accomplish more content with less effort.

Yes, it’s a simple technique, but there’s logic behind it.  Since different people get to see your different social media posts, depending on when they jump on their social media streams – why not share the same thing twice, even more times?

There’s enough data to show us that it is being done by some very successful people, that it brings more output, higher rate of interactions, and even the possibility that some of the re-shared content could go viral after several takes.  Needless to say, we’d need to tweak it to make it unique each time, but the overall concept is incredibly effort saving and traffic-increasing.

Bottom line is, social media can be robbing you of your precious time and energy – but it is an investment in your overall business marketing efforts.  Therefore, we should always be on a lookout for useful methods that can make social media more effective – such as how to increase your output while you reduce your effort.

What are your favorite tips, tricks and hacks to reduce your social media effort while improving your output?

 

Source of Inspiration:  http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/238017

 

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