Six Ways to be More Productive with Social Media

When it comes to digital marketing strategy, establishing a social media presence has become an integral part of branding and engagement with your customers and prospects.

The ultimate challenge for any brand is to stay on top of their social media strategies, which entails a huge amount of time in planning and execution to keep their social media accounts constantly updated, relevant, and engagement-worthy.

If you’re one of those people who want to optimize their company’s social media growth in terms of ROI (Return On Investment), but instead gets sucked into time-wasting activities that have no impact – don’t worry. You’re not alone.

Most marketers make the mistake of channeling their precious time into social media strategies that offer no real value to their business and their customers. By following these tips, we can save you many hours spent on social media and help you start focusing on what really matters.

1. Decide what you want to get from social media.

Many people aimlessly waste their time on social networking sites because they don’t know what their goals are in the first place. It can happen to anyone – what seems to be just a quick, 3-minute Twitter post, often leads to 3 hours of non-stop browsing of the Twitter news feeds.

Sit down for a minute and write down exactly what your social media goals are, why they are important to your overall business, and how will you go about achieving these goals. For example, if your goal is to grow your conversion rate by 15% using social media, how are you going to achieve that? These goals should be specific and measurable to help you see the bigger picture with your social media plan.

2. Use social media management tools to automate your posts.

There are so many social media platforms that posting to each one of them would be one of the biggest time-killers. The purpose and the outcome are quite the same across all platforms, but they serve different types of an audience which require the content to be tailored for each platform.

To save more time, you can automate the process by using social media management automation tools. These tools will help schedule your posts, monitor engagement with your audience, and analyze metrics across different channels. Some awesome time-saving tools to keep you more productive with your social media efforts are Socialoomph, Hootsuite, TweetDeck, and Buffer.

3. You don’t have to be on every platform.

In their quest to be everywhere for everyone, some business owners and marketers jump on every social media site available. It is crucial to understand how these social sites will work for your business goals and how to better engage with your customers.

Just imagine allocating 30 minutes every day to each platform like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+, LinkedIn, and Youtube. That’s 3 hours spent on just social media alone which takes a lot of your time away from doing other important work. To determine which platform to use, do some research on where your customers hang out and know which social network can help you build a relationship with prospects in the least amount of time but with the best results.

4.Respond to meaningful conversations.

While your social media presence gains more traction, there is no doubt that it will build more buzz around your brand. Don’t try to burn yourself out by responding to every comment or reply from your fans or followers because you won’t get anything productive done. While it is crucial to nurture your relationship with your customers and fans by participating actively within the community, make sure that you designate more time to respond to meaningful conversations that benefit your brand as well as your audience.

5. Track metrics that matter.

While there are metrics that demonstrate your performance in terms of sales and revenues, there are some that you should not obsess yourself with. Instead of getting all worked up tracking vanity metrics like the number of fans and followers and reach, focus on measuring referring traffic, lead conversion rate, and number of customers.

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6. Set a time limit.

If you catch yourself wasting too much time browsing social media sites, then you obviously need to find ways to limit your access to these sites. If you’re using Google Chrome, you can install StayFocusd, a browser extension that blocks all listed sites (not just social media sites) for a certain period of time. The point here is to use everything in moderation. Make sure to maximize your time wisely on social media.

By following these actionable tips, you can get rid of your social media time-killers and focus your energy on what truly matters to your business. Do you have other ways that will save time on social media? Let us know in the comments.