Picture it. You’re at your desk, your phone is ringing nonstop, and you have dozens of unanswered emails waiting for a response. Your boss just called a last minute meeting with you and the board in 20 minutes to discuss your firm’s marketing goals and to develop an action plan for next year. He has asked you to speak to the board, to boot. This afternoon you’re meeting with managers from three different high profile companies who are looking to partner with an agency like yours. At some point today, you’re supposed to meet with your content team to review next months editorial calendar and then you’re headed straight to your graphics team to provide feedback on an end of month campaign that launches next week. You hope you can squeeze in lunch sometime today, too.
Sound familiar? So, the question is: “When in the world will you have time to manage your company’s social media?” You were just recently able to convince your boss that maintaining an active, no…”engaging” online presence is absolutely vital to the survival of your company in today’s e-commerce/socially driven world. And you also, in a moment of insanity, offered to single-handedly take your firm’s social presence into the 21st century. Now you’re stuck tweeting, posting, hashtagging, pinning, and blogging on top of your normal 40+ hour responsibilities. Breathe. There is a solution. And it’s simpler than you might think.
Social Media Tips: What Can You Do To Simplify Social Media?
Streamline Your Workflows
To “streamline” literally means “to alter in order to make more efficient and simple.” There are several steps you can take to streamline your workflows. Recruiting team members to share the workload is one of the easiest things you can do. It’s okay to tell yourself “I need help” and to find quality people to assist you. But perhaps you don’t have the resources to delegate tasks or you don’t trust anyone else on your team to handle the company’s social channels responsibly. If this is the case, your next option would be to become very diligent about scheduling your time. You’d be amazed at how much you can accomplish in just 15 minutes twice a day! Next, follow these next few tips…
Embrace Automation
There are several tools on the market today that let you schedule content to be published to your social networks. Facebook uses their own scheduling platform for business profiles, but you can also use programs such as Hootsuite or Sprout Social to schedule on multiple channels simultaneously. These online solutions allow you to schedule days, weeks, or months worth of content with a few simple clicks. This is a great way to share standard and generic content that your personas will love.
Pro Tip: Not only does automation streamline engagement processes by allowing you to manage all your networks from a single place, but most likely it will track analytics and capture leads as well!
Create a Content Calendar
Creating a content calendar with themed days will help you develop a wide variety of content to share every week. We suggest you post 4-7 times a week with a mixture of company-related news, product/services highlights, a link to your recent blog post, one humorous/inspirational post, and one link to an outside article/company (that is not your direct competitor).
Pro Tip: Don’t forget to keep a few days open for trending topics or just-released information that is real-time!
Make Your Content Relevant
Every company is different, and each brand will have its own “daily digital footprint.” The key is to master an effective content strategy that is based around these three areas:
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Buyer Persona Specific. Your routine should follow the natural daily interactions with your ideal customers. If they are, let’s say, stay-at-home moms, you’re highest engagement time of day is probably mid-morning or early afternoon (when little ones are napping). The lowest levels of engagement are probably lunchtime and dinner time. Whereas a business professional will probably be checking their social platforms/emails first thing in the morning, on their lunch break, or shortly after ending their 9-5 grind.
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Product Specific. Your content should be based around your best product/services or ones that you want to draw the most attention to (like a new product launch). Often times developing a campaign centered around a specific product is the best way to draw attention to it’s unique qualities.
- Platform Specific. Keep in mind that each social platform has its own culture, norms, and innuendos. There is a huge difference in how people interact amongst Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn for example. Familiarizing yourself with these characteristics will help you interact more effectively with your target market on each of these networks.
Get Your Customers to Come to You
As you actively blog, tweet, post, pin, and share updates online, you’ll start to attract customers organically. So, it’s safe to say that the more active you are in these areas, the better your personas will be able to hear you above the “noise.” Remember, your content needs to be relevant to your personas. Become an authority in your field and give them content they want to keep coming back for.
Pro Tip: Get up close and personal with your target keywords and include some of the most popular keywords or phrases (aka longtail keywords) in your website page titles, meta tags, and blog post titles.
