1. Automate
Use social media automation tools to help you manage your social media networks. Some of the more commonly used tools are HootSuite and TweetDeck. You can manage all of your social media accounts through a single interface saving you time and energy. Most of these tools also offer RSS Feed management, which also provide a time saving benefit, which will be mentioned below.
2. Outsource
Outsource your social media strategy to social media experts so you can focus on what you do best! Today, outsourcing is more important than ever because it helps free up business owners so they can focus on their core competency. Having an outsourced social media strategist will allow you to delegate the tedious tasks and those areas where you are not as strong. Such areas can be blog/website content creation and management, fan base correspondence, email, calendar, social media management, and much more.
3. Plug-In
With more websites being built on open-source content management systems (WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, etc.), business owners are using Social Media Plug-ins on their website to streamline their social media efforts. When a client adds an article or a web page to their website, they can update all of their social media networks by using social media plug-ins that are located on each webpage that enables sharing across the web thus eliminating the need to go to different websites and replicating the work. Also, this allows visitors to their website’s to bookmark web pages that they like thus raising the website’s online visibility. This is a great PR tool.
4. RSS Feeds
Most people have heard of RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds. RSS feeds allow you to automatically retrieve content from a blog or feed that you like reading without having to go to that particular website. RSS feeds acts like a content aggregation tool. Many of today’s social media websites support RSS feeds, so you can simply post content once and stream it across the web to multiple websites. For instance, you can add a blog post to your website and have a direct RSS feed linking to your Linked-In profile which will auto-populate that recently updated content directly to your Linked-In profile thus saving you time and energy.
5. Create A Schedule
Once you determine when it is the best time to communicate with your target audience, you can use software to schedule your communication to be sent out to your social media network at a specific day and time of your choosing. If you don’t want to use 3rd party software then you should incorporate a block of time each day and/or week to blog, post, communicate and share with your fan base. By using a schedule, this will enable you to treat social media like any other key marketing strategy that you implement and save time by working smarter.
