Achieving maximum results within a limited period – that’s every SMM specialist’s goal. In other words, we’re trying to find the best social media and productivity tips to stay more efficient with our work.
For SMM marketing specialists, productivity is a layered problem:
- Deadlines! They are everywhere! Your clients give you deadlines to develop strategies, implement them, and achieve actual results. No matter how much you need to take a break, important projects cannot wait.
- Procrastination! If you could only do your best when you were pressured by deadlines. Things don’t work out that way in real life. In fact, you tend to become a procrastination master when you should be working the most.
- Burnout! You’ve been working too hard for too long, and your creative mind starts giving up on you. Everyone in this industry gets to the point of a creative block at one point or another.
The SMM trends of 2024 demand more work and better results than ever. They give you many reasons to change the way you work and become better, faster, and more productive.
How 2024 Social Media Marketing Trends Cause Productivity Issues
Storytelling is one of the top SMM trends in 2024. You need to develop a strategy of inter-connected social media posts with continuous narration.
Creating an amazing story out of mundane things isn’t easy, especially when you see that your competitors already came out with a great narrative campaign. Prioritizing quality over quantity may mean producing less, but it also means that you have to work more on every single social media post you share.
There’s no guesswork. Today’s marketing content has to be authentic, personalized, and geared towards cross-promo strategies. Data analytics is becoming more important than ever, since personal data is the foundation of how modern marketing works.
The greater workload calls for a more productive approach. You need to do more within the limited time you have.
How to Leverage Social Media And Productivity: 10 Tips for SMM Specialists
Track the Way You Spend Your Time
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When we focus on productivity boosting, we tend to track performance. That’s not a bad idea, but results aren’t the only thing you should track. The way you spend your time when you work is also important.
Keep a log for a few days. You’ll enter the tasks in their timeframes, your breaks, and everything else you do during working hours (including casual scrolling through social media that’s not actual work). This is a pretty simple practice that requires a single note each 30 minutes: just write down how you spent the previous half an hour.
When you check the logs for a few days, you’ll see how many hours you spent in actual work. Yes; breaks are important. But even they can be productive when you make them purposefully. When you notice useless activities that take away your time and energy, you’ll be able to start eliminating them from your daily routine.
You can also use apps that keep a log on what you do online, like Toggl, Time Camp or Paymo.
Get a Faster Computer
As any other SMM specialist, you must be working with a ton of text drafts, images, and video files. That takes a lot of space on your computer. Even if it’s a new machine, all that workload is making it slower.
A slow computer is a real problem. Yes; opening a single web page will take a second longer. A casual user might not even notice the difference. But when your working process is getting stuck over and over again, you’re losing valuable time.
Then you get frustrated, and you restart the system in a desperate effort to speed it up. That won’t work.
If we’re talking about an older computer that doesn’t update to the latest operating system, you should consider a serious investment. But if your machine is still solid, you can make it faster by getting some of the burden off. Here’s a nice guide on how to free up memory and remove virus on Mac to make it faster.
Stop Being a Perfectionist
Here’s an unpopular tip that your clients won’t like: you don’t have to be a perfectionist. You have many demands to tackle within your working hours. If you spend too much time trying to make one task a 100% perfect, you’ll end up with fewer accomplishments than needed.
Social media develops quickly. Even if a certain post doesn’t achieve great results, you’ll always have another shot to achieve the same goal.
Yes; it’s important to deliver high-quality content and pay attention to all the details. But it’s not OK to fixate on the details while missing the big picture.
Ditch a Few Meetings
That’s another unpopular tip that works wonders!
Business clients love meetings, don’t they? A meeting gives them a chance to directly express their demands.
But the truth is that many meetings with SMM specialists are unnecessary. You have to think about each of their demands, discuss it with your team, and come up with a strategy to meet it. So you always end up getting back to them instead of solving the matter during a single meeting.
The problem with scheduled conferences and meetings is that they suck a lot of the day’s productivity. Schedule them when you’re sure they will contribute towards a better result. For all other instances, rely on the good old email communication.
When a meeting is necessary, appear with a plan! Make sure to go through all points, so you’ll benefit as much as possible out of it.
Forget about Multitasking
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We’ve all been taught to multitask in order to save time. Maybe multitasking works for simple daily tasks, but it’s never a good idea for actual work.
Research shows that your brain slows down and you feel increased levels of stress when you try to multitask. The human mind lacks the neural and cognitive building blocks to perform more than one task simultaneously.
When you attempt to complete multiple tasks at the same time, you’re actually switching between one and another. You’re never doing them simultaneously.
So no; you’re not achieving more when you’re trying to take notes during a meeting while answering messages at the same time. You’re diminishing your effectiveness and focus that way.
Let’s say you have a daily plan that covers the tasks you should complete for two projects. When you switch between one project and another one, you’re shifting your focus. You cannot stop thinking about the first task when you hop onto the second one, since you haven’t completed it yet.
One study showed that when someone performs two tasks intermixed, their response times are slower if compared to their effectiveness when working on a single task repeatedly.
Follow this rule: complete the current task before tackling another one!
Choose Your Tools
SMM specialists need a range of tools to cover their daily responsibilities. You can become more productive if you choose tools that integrate well with one another.
There’s something even better to do: choose multi-functional tools.
For example, Bulk.ly lets you create several social media updates in a matter of minutes. Multiple networks are covered, so you won’t need to schedule posts for Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinedIn separately. Plus, the tool saves you time through marketing automation: the posts will reach your audience at the right time.
In addition to Bulk.ly, the following tools might be helpful:
- Copywritely – for detecting plagiarism and grammar mistakes
- Teamly – for task management
- Google Analytics, Twitter Analytics, Facebook Insights, and Instagram for Business – for analyzing the effects of your campaigns.
Label Your Tasks
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How many tasks do you have to cover this week? If you’re like most SMM specialists, you’re working on at least one important presentation for a meeting, but you also have a few side-projects at the same time.
Your To-Do list will be much more organized when you prioritize. Eisenhower’s well-known principle dates back from the 1950s, but is still effective. He made a distinction between the types of goals we have in a day:
- Urgent – they demand our immediate attention
- Important – they lead towards achieving an important goal
In accordance with this principle, you’ll have 4 types of tasks:
- Urgent and Important
- Important, but not Urgent
- Urgent, but not Important
- Not Important and Not Urgent
When you know what activities from your list are urgent and important, you can cover them first, and then distribute your time between the remaining tasks.
Writing down the tasks in a four-grid list will add a visual aspect to the planning process. Add some color-coding to that, and you’ll have a cool system that keeps your focus on the urgent and important tasks.
Group Similar Tasks Together
No; we’re not talking about multitasking.
We’re talking about grouping similar tasks in a single batch, and covering them one by one. Instead of switching between different tasks, this type of organization will help you stay focused.
How does this work in practice? Let’s say you have to schedule next week’s social media posts and do some research for a report today. Instead of completing a few Facebook posts, then doing some research, then Instagram posts, and then Facebook posts again, you can cover all social media posts one-by-one before shifting your focus to a task of a different type.
Review Social Metrics Every Single Day
Well-organized SMM specialists take one day per month to review their social media performance. This is necessary for assessing what’s working in your strategy, and what adjustments could make it better.
But a lot could change within that month.
The trends are constantly evolving, and so are your competitors’ strategies. Instead of waiting for an entire month for a detailed report, you can make your job easier by checking out the metrics on a daily level. That’s how you’ll notice when a particular post does really well, so you can adjust your upcoming steps towards a similar approach.
Start your working day with this task, and keep taking notes. They will help you with the detailed review at the end of the month.
Keep Learning
As an SMM expert, you’re expected to be updated with the latest news in the industries you cover with your campaigns. But you’re also expected to know all about the latest trends and developments in your own industry.
Take your time to learn about the things that can make you more productive:
- New web analytics tools and methods for result interpretation
- New algorithms that different social media platforms use to deliver content to their users
- Fresh social media tools that competitors use
You should also work on consistent improvement of your skills in data analytics, design, project management, general marketing, copywriting, communication, and presentation.
In other words, a skilled SMM specialist must never stop learning.
Dedicate at least 20 minutes of your day to learning and trend research. This doesn’t mean you should aimlessly scroll through your news feed during that time. Make this a purposeful activity that you’ll include in your daily plans.
Day by day, you’ll keep improving the skills that make you better at your job.
Organization Is Key to Success
Becoming more productive is all about organizing your work. The above-listed tips are a good starting point. If you start implementing them one by one, you’ll notice that you can achieve better results in less time.
Start by tracking the way you spend your day. If you notice a pattern that’s undermining your productivity, you’ll eliminate it. Then, you’ll add a few strategies to boost your effectiveness. Productivity doesn’t mean working more; it means achieving more within the same time you spend at work.
And don’t forget about the most important productivity tip of all: learn to say no to responsibilities that are not necessary for achieving good results. Sometimes your clients express wishes that go against the initial goals you set. In that case, you should remind them of the priorities and keep the focus there.
There’s no reason to dramatically change the way you work. If you already rely on effective methods, keep up with the good work and build up on that foundation!