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Even with a modest level of ambition behind it, managing social media for a business is a mammoth task. How are you realistically supposed to keep up with the relentless pace of updates, queries, feedback, and even complaints? Even if you do manage it somehow, it’ll likely lead to burnout, as well as produce a steadily-increasing risk that you’ll slip up and post something in poor taste that gets you savaged in the court of public opinion. If you’re a social media manager, then, you need all the help you can get — ways to make your everyday workload simpler, faster, and less exhausting. Thankfully, you have options. Here are 8 straightforward social media hacks that can make your life easier: Social Media Hack #1: Create image templates Visuals are mission-critical for social media promotion, because even the most engaging article will sink without trace if you don’t attach an eye-catching image to the link. The problem is that finding suitable images takes time — often time that you really can’t afford to spare. If you gloss over it, you look bad. If you spend too long, you struggle. And it’s probably not an easy task unless you are an award winning web designer. This is why you need to create branded templates in whichever image editing tool you typically use (it could be anything from Photoshop to Easil). Set out your branded elements — here are some useful suggestions for that — and get everything ready so all you need to do is find a suitable image (stock or otherwise), drop it in, and change the title. Social Media Hack #2: Repurpose material You could make every post unique — but there’s no reason to. Even if there’s substantial overlap between your Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest followers, no one is going to complain upon seeing the same post used on multiple platforms. Furthermore, when you make everything unique, it’s incredibly easy to run out of content. And when it comes to using the same tweet several times, consider that it’s extremely common, and for good reason. Twitter feeds move quickly, and attention is at a premium. Once a post has fallen off the screen, it’s forgotten… so why not use it again after a while? That’s exactly what Bulkly is perfect for: recycling your updates to squeeze out maximum value. Social Media Hack #3: Focus on content quality A lot of digital content ends up going to waste. It’s so boring that readers don’t care, or it doesn’t get read in the first place. When a piece of content ends up as a dud, it’s a massive waste, because it takes time to write and distribute content — time that needs provide ROI. That’s why you need to ensure that your content is outstanding. When producing content, place each piece into one of two categories: evergreen, or ephemeral. Evergreen content is high-quality and applicable throughout the year. Great evergreen content will bring in traffic indefinitely, and you can link to it semi-regularly without it losing value. Ephemeral content is time-sensitive: it brings in a lot of attention, but only for a short while, or at a particular time of the year (think Christmas content). Social Media Hack #4: Set up a social chatbot Chatbots aren’t magical, and they can’t completely supplant people, but they are excellent for handling certain types of task: namely answering frequent questions, taking orders, and helping visitors navigate your site. The more of those tasks are handled automatically, the more time you’ll have to spend on the things that can’t be automated. If you run a website or a blog on something like WordPress, you have plenty of options out there: here’s a selection to get you started. If your site is actually a dedicated ecommerce store, then you’ll have more sales-centric options: for instance, anyone who uses Shopify’s snappy store designer can simply install the Messenger Chatbot Marketing app. Get everything configured, and you can just let it run for you, with you there to step in if anything goes wrong. Social Media Hack #5: Encourage UGC UGC is user-generated content, so anything that your followers produce — whether it’s on your behalf, or simply featuring your business in some way. Think of reviews, testimonials, pieces of artwork, direct recommendations, blog posts, etc. UGC is incredibly powerful because you barely need to do anything for it once it’s happening. If you can spur people to produce content, all you need to do is curate it to a basic degree. How do you get UGC? Provide minor incentives. Enter everyone who tweets a review of your product into a competition of some kind, perhaps. Alternatively, just ask politely. Shockingly enough, people like having interesting tasks to do, and if someone likes your company enough to follow it on social media, there’s a decent chance they’ll be game to participate. Social Media Hack #6: Group up your tasks No one is truly great at multitasking. Some people manage it competently, but it’s never ideal. What you want to achieve is something akin to the flow state — complete concentration with optimal performance, never getting distracted. You can’t manage that if you keep swapping back and forth between tasks: tweeting, posting on Facebook, writing titles, sourcing images, etc. So what do you do? You group up your tasks logically. You do all your tweets, then your Facebook posts, then your content preparation. While you’re tweeting, you’ll enter into a comfortable tweeting rhythm, and have them all done much faster. Social Media Hack #7: Take advantage of trends Trying to come up with suitable post ideas can take a lot of time and effort, so whenever you have an opportunity to skip it, you should take it. Thankfully, Twitter near-constantly provides ideas in the form of trends. All you need to do is keep an eye on your company Twitter feed, and look out for hashtags that might be relevant to whatever you’re trying to market. How

In the coming years, social media will continue to be a dominant fixture in marketing activities, particularly for small business. Here are three effective ways you can gear up your small business marketing efforts for 2024, and how to do it for the best results possible.

The competition for SaaS businesses is becoming tougher. In order to succeed, you obviously need to set yourself apart from the competitors. Here are seven tools that will make building your SaaS social media presence easier and some insights into their marketing strategies – used by the leaders from all over the globe. Check them out and dare to try what you find the most efficient.

You know very well just how different it is to run a social media account for a business compared to your own personal account. When I’ve mentioned that I work in social media management I’ve reactions like “it must be so fun to just look at memes all day on Instagram!” But, from one social media manager to another, we know our jobs call for much more than “scrolling through Twitter.” As our audiences continue to crave more exciting, personalized, and frequent updates, it can feel like an uphill battle to write, share, and curate compelling content. In a world where technology is constantly evolving and our audiences’ appetites for information continues to grow, social media managers need someone in their corner. In this case, let that someone be a few handy social media browser extensions. When managing social media you’re trying to juggle all the requests from the content and PR teams to share their work, while also filling in the gaps with content you’ve been curating. The only thing that could help you manage it all each day would be to have more time. Although we can’t stop time, we can use social media tools to make the best use of it. At a startup, we’re always looking for ways to save time, or to help with our efficiency. So, we use browser extensions, to manage many of these social media requests right from our browsers saving time and increasing speed. Here’s Rebrandly’s favorite browser extensions for social media managers. 1. Grammarly There is nothing worse than that feeling of sending out a tweet with a simple grammar error. As soon as you notice the mistake, flashbacks of your primary school teacher scolding you about the difference between there, they’re, and their ????. Lucky for us there’s a browser extension for that called Grammarly. This extension checks both your grammar and writing style, and lets you know every time you’ve made a mistake. You can get a complete inside look of Grammarly here. 2. Buffer Buffer makes it quick and easy to share on social media. When you’re online scrolling and you find something you want to share, you just click the extension, choose the accounts you want to post to, and Buffer will autofill the title. It also gives you the option to add any photos that it pulled from the content. My favorite part is the fact that you can add it to your “queue,” share it now, or add it to a custom schedule. I’ve found this extension extremely helpful to schedule and organize curated content on Twitter. 3. Rebrandly One of the most challenging thing about writing is keeping things short and succinct, and social media you have no choice but to keep posts brief. It can feel like solving a Rubix Cube to write a post that’s compelling, clear, and contains an actionable CTA in the least amount of characters. Rebrandly stamps every link you share online with your brand name, what you do, and where the link will lead in just a few words. That helps solve a few of our collective social media manager problems, right? Instead of using a generic short URL that carries the name of another company and doesn’t feature a CTA, branded links on social media immediately create trust with your audience. The best part is, you don’t even have to leave the piece of content you’re posting to brand the link. Just click the Rebrandly browser extension, customize the fields in whatever way you see fit, and boom, link branded. 4. Pocket Pocket is so simple, yet it’s one I rely on everyday. It’s essentially a “read-it-later” tool. When managing social media I use it as, a “share-it-later” tool. As I’m quickly skimming through the dozens of newsletters in my inbox each morning, I’ll see an article or video I think could be interesting for our audience and instead of reading it in that moment, I’ll Pocket it to review later. Once you have an arsenal of interesting stories, you can use a social media automation tool like Bulk.ly to share your content on all platforms, and even recycle past shares, taking the headache of constantly searching for new articles. 5. Check My Links Picture a typical day. The content team excitedly hands over the latest blog post for you to push live on all platforms. Ten minutes later a comment trickles in saying “the link in the introduction is saying is broken”. Not only does the writer feel bad, but it’s not a good reflection if a reader calls out one of your mistakes. The Check My Links extension checks every link on the web page you’re sharing. If there is anything broken it will be highlighted in red, giving you the chance to fix them before hitting “send.” 6. Pablo Pablo will be your best friend if you’re not a graphic designer but still want to create and share custom social media sized images. They have thousands of pictures to choose from, and even give you the option to add personalized text and a logo to make the image on brand for your company. If even works if you want to upload your own images, just be sure to check if they fit the format for your chosen social media outlet within the editing options. And once you have created all your images, why not recycle your social media images again and again? 7.SimilarWeb The SimilarWeb extension saves me so much time when I’m measuring if the content I’m sharing is from a legitimate and trusted website. Whether I’m sharing a one off piece of evergreen content and I want to make sure the source is valid, or mentioning another company on Twitter and want to check they’re reputable, this tool is extremely helpful. This extension gives you both traffic and engagement statistics for any website. With one click I can learn the average bounce rate, page views, monthly visits, traffic sources, site rankings,

Delivering on social media customer service isn’t easy. Today’s consumers are more demanding than ever before; Social Media Today reports that 60% of all users who complain expecting a response within an hour. And that’s not all – 67% of us now use social networks like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram to find a resolution to our problems, and one-third of us would prefer to speak to a customer service advisor on Twitter than we would over the phone. But it’s not all doom and gloom. Customer service on social media is often quicker and more cost-effective than hiring a dedicated customer service advisor to man your phone lines, and because responses are public, you get to show the world (or your followers, at least) that you care about your customers and want to put things right. When done well, it’s powerful marketing. In fact, when businesses deliver excellent customer service on social media, consumers end up spending 20% to 40% more than they would have otherwise spent, so it pays to put in the effort and keep your patrons happy and invest in a customer service strategy on social media. The biggest challenge for any small or medium-sized business in delivering effective customer service on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or Instagram is time, so today, we’ve rounded up some of the ways that you can speed up your responses and keep your customers happy. (Don’t have a business yet? Here are a few business ideas to get you started.) Hire a social media manager to help with customer support Whether you’re a small business or you’re managing a team of 200, delivering effective social media customer service on your own just isn’t possible. Sure, keeping open tabs of your Twitter and Facebook pages is a smart move, but the time and dedication required to manage every comment is just too much – so hiring a social media manager to do it for you is a good move. And depending on your business, another option could be to look for a volunteer coordinator who can help. The average social media manager will set you back around $50,000 per year, but if you make the right decision when hiring, you’ll be able to find a marketing expert that will be able to create graphics, grow your audience and drive more referrals back to your website. And when they’re not doing all of that, they can be answering customer comments and dealing with complaints on Twitter. Indeed, customer service training should be top of the list for every social media manager, so organise time for them to get to grips with your business and the most appropriate responses for comments, complaints and inquiries from your customers. If your budget doesn’t stretch to hiring a social media manager, then consider training your existing customer service team to keep tabs on your social media accounts. You can take it in turns to check profiles and respond to customer comments, and if your staff is more used to speaking with disgruntled clients over the phone, they can resolve issues privately that way. Set a social media management rota for customer support It doesn’t matter whether you’ve got one social media manager or fifteen customer service advisors; set a clear rota so you know who’s managing your accounts at any given time. There are tools for customer service on social media like Mention, Brand24 and Sprout Social, but they’re expensive and can cause confusion if multiple employees are dealing with the same customer. Instead, set a rota and give each of your employees the responsibility of one of your social networks during operating hours. You can try free social media tools like TweetDeck to manage comments and inquiries effectively, and you can integrate your social media customer service with your existing lead generation and complaints procedures to ensure a straight-forward handover. The key to providing excellent service is consistency, so make sure you write down notes and have everyone on the same page to avoid confusion and to help resolve issues as soon as possible. Turn on notification alerts to stay on top of social media customer service If you’re running a business on your own but you spend a lot of your time on the go, then a wise move would be to turn on notification alerts so you know as soon as a customer gets in touch. On Twitter, you can turn on Notification alerts by going to Settings and Privacy, tapping on Notifications and selecting the Push notifications you’d like to receive. You can turn on alerts for Direct Messages or Mentions, and even filter them so only genuine interactions come through. On Facebook, go to your Business Page, Settings, Notifications and choosing the types of alerts you’d like to receive. Facebook gives you a huge range of options, offering more control over the type of customer service you’d like to deliver. If you want to respond to every customer interaction, then you can turn on notifications for Check-ins, Mentions, Reviews and Comments, or if you’d like to take a backseat and only respond to direct interactions, you can turn on notifications just for Messages. On your phone, these will be sent to your Messenger app. You can turn on push notifications for comments, tags and messages on Instagram by going to your profile, clicking the tog, and turning on notifications there. LinkedIn offers a similar feature – just tap the Notifications bell, then the More icon and run through your Notifications settings. It’s important to remember turning on notifications could “blow up your phone” if you’re suddenly inundated with messages, so look at filtering options and choose the most appropriate settings. Trigger auto-replies to improve customer service on social media Autoresponders can help to speed up your social media response times, as you can link users to your FAQs or give them your number; great if you’re out of the office or closed for the night. While they’re not the right option in

There are those who argue that the total social media followers on social media channels is nothing but a vanity figure. And in some ways, they’re right. If you’re sweeping Twitter and following every account possible, seeking only a follow-back in return, then yes, your follower count is an empty figure, made up of bots, phonies and those get-rich-quick scammers. Plus, what’s the value of a following that includes little to no target customers?

Get great looking graphics without spending a lot of money. Learn four simple social media graphic design hacks that will help you create awesome images.

Keeping your social media profiles full of great content won’t happen by accident. Nope, you’ll need a social media content calendar to make it happen. Why? Well, having a plan for social media updates ensures that you won’t be left scrambling to find something to share when it’s crunch-time. Let me ask you something… Do you wear a watch? Use an outlook calendar? Carry a day planner with you? Hang a calendar in your work or home office? Most likely, you answered yes to at least one of the above. And the reason why is obvious. You can leave earlier for work on Tuesday, when you know your offsite meeting that morning takes longer to get to than the office. You can pick up dinner on Wednesday knowing soccer practice is at 6 pm that evening. You can put out all the dishware your mother-in-law gave you when you know she’s coming to visit next week… You get the picture. Having a plan in place helps you be more effective at whatever it is you do. And not just that – it allows you to be more flexible and strategic when things you didn’t expect pop up out of nowhere. Like using the time you’d normally spend making dinner to clean up after the 14 soccer players that you didn’t know would be coming over that evening. Like life, effective social media management requires forethought, with unexpected issues and opportunities popping up all the time. Therefore, having a plan in place leaves you better equipped to handle any curveballs thrown your way. [color-box color=” customcolorpicker=”] And in this guide, I’ll cover everything you ever wanted to know about social media content calendars. You’ll learn: What is a social media content calendar Why you should use a social media content calendar How to create a social media content calendar When it makes sense to use social media automation instead of creating a social content calendar[/color-box] Let’s get started. What is a social media content calendar? If you’ve been managing your brand’s social media accounts long enough, you probably have a pretty good grasp on the kinds of posts you share on a regular basis. But sitting there every day, drilling out copy and posting in real-time is cutting into the time you really should be spending on engaging with followers or coming up with your next great ad campaign. Not to mention churning new social updates out every day can be super tedious and boring. But what if you devoted a single chunk of time to planning, drafting and scheduling ALL of the content you’re going to share that week, month or maybe even quarter? By doing so, you’d be creating a social media content calendar: a dated outline used as the framework for the posts you’re planning to share over a set period of time. Then you can flesh it out on a daily basis with real-time updates: engaging with followers, sharing timely external content and monopolizing on spur-of-the-moment trends and updates. Sound intimidating? Sure. But it doesn’t have to be. No need to over complicate it – building out a social content planning calendar should help you save time, not waste it. Make it your own. Pick a format that you feel most comfortable using (we’ll talk more about that later). Cover a manageable span of time. Believe me, the benefits are worth the effort. Why use a social media content calendar? We’ve already mentioned the “duh factor” of why it pays to use a social media content calendar: you’re setting aside a few hours to build out social media updates for a longer period of time than just the here and now. Thus, saving you time overall and freeing you up to become more strategic on a daily basis. Strategery for the win. Now let’s dig a litter deeper into the additional benefits you can expect to gain by using one. 1. Be prepared for the unexpected. Stuff happens. Whether you get the flu or your office loses power, the unpredictable is always going to pop up when you least expect it. If you don’t have plans for what to share that day and posts scheduled in advance, your social media accounts go dark when you do. 2. Post at the optimal time on your social channels. What time is your audience most active on social media? Hopefully you know the answer to this, but if you don’t, you can find information like this about your audience via built-in analytics tools (like Facebook Insights) or other free or paid tools. Say you know your audience is most active in the evening, from 4-7 pm. Are you always free then to be posting in real-time? Are you sure your morning meetings won’t run over and cause you to have to scramble to find content worth scheduling for that afternoon? When you use a social content calendar, you can design it to emphasize your most engaging content and/or greatest frequency of posts during the period of time that your audience is most active (here’s how to find the best time to tweet). With this content planned and scheduled in advance, you never have to worry about potentially missing your optimal posting window. And you can plan to be actively engaging with your audience then as well. 3. Manage multiple social media accounts effectively. Who ONLY has a Facebook page and nothing else? Twitter? Pinterest? Let’s hope no one’s raising their hand. The majority of brands have at least two, maybe even five or six different social media accounts to manage and monitor on a daily basis. So you know trying to draft copy for updates that will be equally effective across all accounts takes some elbow grease. And coordination. Hopping around all day from one channel to another, posting and engaging, posting and engaging isn’t only going to burn you out pretty quickly and increase the risk of mistakes (wrong sized image, inaccurate details, spelling errors, etc.), it’s just

Social media is all about connecting with your audience. You need to provide them with engaging social media posts and be engaged with it yourself – asking questions and starting conversations. Social media automation can help hugely with this. It isn’t about bulking up content, automating questions and then not looking at your social media platforms for the rest of the year. It’s about being organized, having a constant flow of content and making the content you have go further. While the content you share should be engaging, you may worry about scheduling the same content multiple times. Will it bore your audience? Will it make them unfollow you? No, resharing content, particularly if it’s evergreen, is a great move. Over the years, organic Facebook reach has declined quite a bit. In 2012, Facebook revealed that on average a newsfeed post is only seen by 12% of followers. But since then research by EdgeRank Check (which has now been acquired by Social Bakers) showed that by March 2014, this had declined to 6.5%. So it’s unlikely any of your followers will even notice if you schedule something more than once, because the fact is that most people won’t see a post the first time you share it. By sharing a piece of content again, you are increasing the chances that a user who missed it the first time will see it. Resharing is better than a bare newsfeed or not being seen by your followers at all. Scheduling and sharing both evergreen content and new content in a strategic way will help build your social media presence without it taking over your life. But it’s only helpful if what you’re posting engages your followers and other social media users. So here are some tips for scheduling the most engaging social media posts possible. How to put a social media scheduling plan in place Know what you want you to gain by using social media Before you start posting, it’s a good idea to have a social media strategy in place so you know exactly what it is that you want to gain from your social media activities. Do you want to have a large number of followers, so at a glance people will see your business as popular and trusted? Or do you want to build a truly engaging social media presence, with a focus on likes, comments, shares and conversations? If you’re all about conversions, share content related to your products and services and think best about how to do this in a way that won’t overwhelm followers. The 80/20 rule seems to be becoming the standard for content marketing. This means only 20% of your content should directly promote your brand, products or services, while the other 80% is content that informs, intrigues and grabs your customer’s attention but isn’t directly related to your products. Use a social media style guide to stay on brand Once you know what it is that you want to get out of your social media platforms, you can put together a social media style guide to use as a reference point. It might seem a bit excessive to have a style guide specifically for social media, but the idea behind it is to keep your posts consistent and to make sure your social presence is in keeping with your brand voice. This is particularly important if more than one person is writing content for your social media platforms. A social media style guide is a practical marketing tool to make sure that everything you say and do on social media makes sense for your brand. In your guidelines, include things like personas, tone, language, the types of images and curated content you should share, your brand values, adjectives to describe your personality, as well as more practical information on where you should post and how often. You can even go as far as offering platform specific guidelines, which URL shortener to use and how to deal with trolls. We like this social media style guide from New York University, because it includes words not to use on its social media, as well as specific directions on punctuation. [perfectpullquote align=”full” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]“In VERY RARE instances (major celebrity appearances, top awards, international recognition, etc.) multiple exclamation points may be used (but think judiciously about whether the situation warrants more than one).”[/perfectpullquote] It may seem over the top, but correct punctuation is particularly important for a university’s brand. You can also check out this social media style guide from MailChimp, which is part of the company’s overall content style guide. It’s very clear, succinct and would make it easy for anyone posting to their social channels to be on brand. Your style guide doesn’t have to be long, but if it includes examples and is comprehensive, it will make everything easier. Take a glance at it before sitting down to schedule some posts – or keep it beside you for any questions that may pop up while you’re posting. If you sit down to organise some scheduling, you’ll quickly get into the flow of things. If you build a consistent voice, your followers will be more likely to engage with your content. It’s likely the reason they followed you in the first place. Create a holiday calendar to inspire quirky posts A holiday calendar might appear at odds with the whole idea of automating social media content in advance. While the bulk of your content should be evergreen so it can be re-posted numerous times, if you fail to look at the calendar, you may be missing out on opportunities. Use a content calendar to keep an eye out for what people will be talking about. If you forget to wish your customers a happy Christmas and continue to post non-stop about the benefits of e-commerce, they might start to notice a lack of human touch. Having a holiday calendar with the year’s main holidays and events, as well as some