One great thing about social media is that most social media platforms are free. Of course there are the premium versions for some sites, and social media ads, but for the most part, you can create and maintain your social media sites for free. However, if you are spending ALL your time on social media, not being effective, and not being able to work on your business, you are wasting time and money!
Having enough time in the day is a problem with many business owners, and if you want to excel with your social media and be more productive, read these tips.
Content Curation
It’s important to share your own content, but you want to also educate your audience by sharing other interesting content. You can waste hours sifting through information, or you can try some of these tools:
Pocket lets you save interesting articles and videos and view them later. You can access your list from almost any device, and integrate your Pocket account to save articles from apps like Twitter, Flipboard, and more than 300 other sites.
Feedly is awesome to use to save interesting articles and to follow certain brands and business blogs. It’s easy to use and the iPhone app is super easy too.
Delicious is a social bookmarking site and you can find and save links to articles. This is a handy tool if you often switch devices and always want your bookmarks on hand.
Flipboard, Pinterest and Twitter are also useful to find great articles and infographics to share- just don’t spend too much time searching.
Create Amazing (and Easy) Graphics
Using visuals on your social media posts and blogs are pretty much a given, but you might have a hard time finding free graphics to use that are specific to your subject. There are some super easy (and free) sites that make this oh-so-simple for you.
Canva is awesome! Create your social media graphics- anything from your Facebook cover to infographics, you can pretty much create anything. There are free images you can use and low-cost options too, starting at one dollar.
I also like using Picmonkey for easy graphic edits, like resizing or adding text. It’s simple, easy and fast.
Schedule Posts
Once you have your interesting content to share, and your amazing graphics, you just need to post to your social media accounts. An option to save time on posting is to schedule posts. I wouldn’t suggest scheduling everything, and you definitely want to be monitoring your accounts for comments, reviews, etc. but, this can absolutely be a huge time-saver.
Social media management tools like Hootsuite, Sprout Social and Buffer make posting to various social sites faster and easier. Hootsuite is one of the most popular social media management tools and you can schedule posts as well as track posts and mentions. If you use Chrome, you can add an extension to integrate with Hootsuite.
Finding a trusted source for content sharing and creation, creating easy graphics, and scheduling your social media posts in advance are all options to save time with your social media.
