There are never enough hours in the day.
When your business has many different components to worry about—sales, marketing, content creation, managing social media accounts, and organizing company events, to name a few—it’s hard to find time for it all. And what’s usually the first job role to suffer from a lack of time? Social media management.
Don’t allow your social media accounts to suffer because you don’t have the time (or resources) to keep them alive. They’re too important to your business development efforts to sit there and collect cobwebs. Instead, think about these time-saving tips that will help you make better use of your time when managing your social media accounts.
But first, while we don’t need to explain the importance of social media for generating leads and new business (you know this), these numbers are worth pointing out. Statista reported 1.3 billion social media users in 2013. That number is expected to grow to 2.44 billion users by 2018. Your customers are out there; you just have to find them and engage with them.
So, back to how you can use these social media time-savers and revive your strategies to generate more leads.
1. Set goals for what you want to accomplish on social media
You don’t go into a sales meeting without a strategy. Posting to social media should be no different. What are your goals for being on LinkedIn or Twitter? What are you trying to accomplish?
For Twitter, the most obvious goal is to increase your followers. But followers aren’t everything. Instead, make a goal to interact with 3 new (relevant) users a day. Reach out to people in your industry and engage with them. If your company provides EHR applications for small medical practices, engage with people that use these technologies. Ask questions, post comments, encourage people to engage with you.
Important to keep in mind: use cocktail party rules—post 80% about what others are saying and doing, and 20% about yourself.
Setting goals saves you time when performing these next steps. Always come back to your goals and ask yourself if your efforts are aligning with them.
2. Use social media automation tools
A huge time-saver: have someone else do it for you! In this case, that someone else is one of the many social media automation tools that are available to help you post more frequently and effectively.
Some of these tools include HootSuite, SocialBro, and Buffer. Each one of these offers a wide range of options for scheduling tweets and posts. Using social media automation tools allow you to go back to worrying about other tasks and not worrying that your social media presence is suffering as a result.
3. Curate content 20-30 minutes a day
This graphic from Buffer’s blog shows that finding content to post takes up the most time when managing social media.
If you spend about 20-30 minutes of your day trolling the Internet for relevant content to share, you will wind up with enough content for at least a couple of days. This tip brings us back to the 80/20 rule of sharing more relevant information from others than from yourself. And once you have a masterly curated collection, schedule some posts for the week. Then get right back to it tomorrow.
We’re not suggesting that you ONLY curate content for 20-30 minutes a day, but it provides a good guideline to getting started.
Another posting tip to keep in mind is to share relevant and timely content. So if you come across an article with breaking news in your industry, go back and share that right away. This type of strategy is called newsjacking, and it’s extremely effective for generating buzz.
If you’re having a hard time organizing all of your remarkably curated content, use some of these free content creation tools. In particular, Trello or Evernote could be very useful to you when curating and storing content.
After you have been at it for a couple weeks, you will start to see what posts generated the most traffic or click-throughs. Learn from this data and adjust your social media posting strategies.
Being an active member of any social media community is time consuming, but it’s not impossible. With these time-saving tips you can more effectively reach and target your potential prospects. Learn more about social prospecting by downloading our eBook below.
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