Without a clear game plan, social media marketing can quickly evolve into a vortex sucking you in and claiming all your time and attention. It is almost impossible to limit your time spent on the social media, engaging with your followers and looking at what your competitors are doing, without losing track of time and realising that hours have passed and you are way behind with other tasks.
If you are already halfway down the sinkhole of social media marketing, then you need to stop and read this article right now. You need to understand that there are ways in which you can and should put limits to the time and effort spent on working on your social media marketing strategies and posting schedule. And we will provide you with the guidance you need in order to create these boundaries and stick to them.
These are the main actions you need to take in order to regain control over your time and daily activities:
1. Find the Social Media Platforms with the Highest ROI
There is no point spending time on a social media platform which simply does not yield the kind of results you expect. Usually, this happens because your potential customers are not there – they congregate elsewhere. It is tempting to insist posting content, paying for ads because “the time is not yet ripe for success” – but it is more realistic, time and money saving for you to accept the fact that your business will not gain many customers and gain a satisfactory ROI from that specific social media platform.
So, stop wasting time and resources on it and focus on 2 or 3 social media platforms from which you have already obtained relevant results.
2. Link Social Media Accounts
This simple action helps you share the content posted on a social media platform on all the others which are linked to it. In this way, you save time and maximise the potential of a post to reach more people, go viral and bring your more traffic and sales.
Currently, you can link most of the relevant social media platform accounts, such as Facebook™, Instagram, Twitter and Pinterest.
3. Use Social Media Automation Tools
We have discussed in depth about these helpful tools. Even if some of them are not free, the monthly subscription you pay is worth the time and effort you save. Automation tools do not only allow you to schedule your posts for days or even weeks ahead. They offer you insights into the way your posts perform across the social media, present you with the hottest trends among your preferred audience, help you find and share curated content, and put you in touch with the top influencers and thought leaders in your niche.
4. Reuse Old Content
Evergreen topics, inspirational articles and helpful tutorials never go out of trend. And it is most likely that your more recent followers never got the chance to read or view them. Thus, it is recommended to re-share such content, saving you the time of creating fresh content all the time and giving all your followers the chance to learn something new, be informed or entertained.
5. Engage Selectively
Not all customers or social media followers are equal. Their claims on your time should, therefore, be treated selectively. If you receive a private message asking for the availability of a certain item in your stocks, this type of engagement deserves your attention as soon as possible, because it can conclude with a sale. However, a general purpose question can wait until the moment of the day which you set aside for dealing with social media comments and private messages.
Thus, by setting boundaries to the time, money and efforts you spend on the social media, you get the most of the engagement and conversion without letting the social media override everything else on your daily schedule.