Weight Loss for Your Social Media

What is weight loss for your social media? One of the most popular New Year’s Resolutions is weight loss; but what about trimming down your time, money and energy spent on social media?

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Social media is important to incorporate into your marketing strategy, but sometimes you need to do an audit, see what’s working for your business, and cut-out what’s not working- or revise it.

Trim down the number of social media platforms you are on- if they aren’t working for you.

Here are some tips for trimming down the non-essential social media platforms, and discovering tools to help save you time.

Conduct a social media audit

Determine your overall goal for social media for your business (brand awareness, number of new leads, email sign ups, app downloads, etc.) and then goals for each platform you are using, as each platform could have a unique goal.

Then, take an inventory of all your social media platforms.

Write down:

the social media platforms you are currently using
the number of followers/ fans
how much engagement you get on each platform (are people liking, commenting and sharing your content?)
if your goals being reached on each platform
how much website traffic the platforms are generating (check your Google Analytics account)
if you actually enjoy using the platform

If you discover that not only are you not getting any engagement from a platform, but you are not reaching your goals for the platform, and you don’t even like using that platform, cut it out of your plan. Spend your valuable time on platforms that actually perform for you, and most importantly, that you enjoy using.

Learn how to use the platforms

You could be wasting a lot of valuable time on social media, simply because you don’t know how to use the platform, or don’t know where to find things. There are some great social media learning platforms including:

Facebook Blueprint for Facebook, Facebook ads and Instagram training
Hootsuite Academy provides social media training and you can get certified for $199
LinkedIn offers a training centre and has social media training, marketing, and business though this is a monthly paid subscription, you can get a free month.

Depending on the social media platform you decide to keep in your overall strategy, there are platform-specific courses you can take to learn key elements of that platform. There are often low-cost alternatives and if you want to go free, consider watching YouTube video tutorials.

For a low-cost, beginner social media course, check out my new course for less than $50.

Tools to save you time

I love tools to help save time on social media and there are many low-cost or even free tools you can use.

Social media scheduling

I use Hootsuite for scheduling my social media posts, and it saves you time by viewing the Hootsuite dashboard and viewing several platforms at once. I currently use the free version and it works well. There are other scheduler’s people enjoy; Sendible, Sprout Social, and Edgar.

I also use Buffer and Hiplay to help keep my Twitter profile consistent and active. I use the free Buffer account, but Hiplay costs $5 a month (which I think is 100% worth it).

Content Curation

Creating your own content via blogs, videos and graphics is great and you want to spend most of your time on this, but sharing other people’s content can help save you time creating so much content.

Use news collection sites like Feedly.com, Pocket, or Alltop to eliminate the need of browsing several websites and find relevant articles to share on social media.