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 relevant? Well, as long as you can find some type of way to relate your promotion to the hashtag — and you’re not horribly misunderstanding the purpose of the hashtag, which is an ever-present threat — then it’s relevant enough for your needs.
Social Media Hack #8: Delegate where you can
As a social media manager, you’re part of a larger company, so you don’t have to do everything alone. Sure, it falls upon you to come up with the direction, strategy, and tone to be struck, but there’s no reason why you can’t delegate some aspects to your colleagues.
Think about how much your fellow workers could contribute to the company’s social media activity: the insights they could share about the work they do and the overall direction of the company. Hearing from specific people in a company makes it feel more approachable, as well. Even if you’re the only media-savvy person on the team, you can still make it work — ask your colleagues to submit anecdotes and pieces of information, then edit and post them.
Wrapping up Social Media Hacks
Working in social media can be extremely enjoyable — you get to communicate with so many different types of people, experiment with new platforms and technologies, and incrementally build up your company’s reputation. But it is very demanding on your time, and you don’t want to overlook anything important.
Using these social media hacks, you can significantly speed up your ideation, creation and delivery processes, allowing you to get much more done with your time. That means better results, happier colleagues, and an easier life. Why not give them a try?
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