The reality is that social is a hard space to get right, but it is free to get started. This makes for a lot of frustrated businesses that end up spending more time on social media than they’d anticipated – let’s call this social creep. Here’s how to end it.
So how can we stop this social creep from happening? After all, being switched on and engaging 24 hours a day is no small task – so I have come up with three tips you can use to do more with less.
1. Use social media management tools
There are quite a lot of free tools that you can use to shrink your social media time to one hour a day. Being smart about scheduling your posts and subscribing for services that push notifications can save you a lot of time and heartache when maintaining a “presence online”.
My favourites are Crowdbooster and Hootsuite. Hootsuite has a mobile app too so you can check your accounts on the go.
2. Link your updates
This is a general no no in social media circles as we know a different audience and demographic requires different messages, but linking your accounts together and feeding updates through each other is a huge time saver.
Think about linking your Facebook updates to feed straight into Twitter, or vice versa, or setting it up so your blog posts to feed straight into Twitter or Facebook. Once these are set up, you don’t need to spend the time to update it. This doesn’t mean you don’t create unique content, but you should focus on one particular channel.
3. Concentrate on one
Focusing on building one main channel is much easier than trying to build a presence on three or four networks. They key to doing this properly is to know which channel the majority of your customers are.
It might be that 90 percent of your customers are on Facebook but only 20 percent are on Twitter. If you don’t know the breakdown of this, you can find out simply by setting up a survey or doing some sample testing. Once you figure out which is the main channel, you can concentrate on maximising the effectiveness of that channel for your business.
Social media is a must for small businesses to remain competitive and to create awareness online. It is also becoming a huge part of the criteria for search engine optimisation so it can’t be ignored. The important thing is to be smart about it so you can stop wasting more time than you need. Let’s stop social creep!