10 Unique Ways to Save Time on Social Media Management
Note: This post was first published on Sep 22, 2015 and has since been updated with additional information.
Social media never sleeps. And that makes social media management a particularly challenging task. Keeping up with the incessant activity on social media can be a painstakingly time-consuming process. And if managing your business’ social media presence is not your only responsibility, you will be all the more hard-pressed for time.
Here are a few social media management tips that can make your life just a tad bit easy. These 10 tips from real-life digital marketers will help you do a lot more with the little time you have.
1. “Create a social calendar by planning out the posts for the month. This could be specific articles you want to post on specific days or ideas for topics on that day. Having a set out schedule will make it much easier to follow and stay organized. A social calendar also makes it easier to see what content is working and what isn’t because it is all logged.”
– Morgan O’Mara
Digital Marketing Content Coordinator at Shred Nations
2. “Create Your Own Templates as in the types of posts you will use and a format for them. For example, a tips post, a news post, or for when you share someone else’s relevant post. When you have a list of post types, it’s much easier to think up and create posts based on those guidelines instead of trying to create it every time.”
– Beth Bridges
Vice President of Digital Identity at ARTCO by J
3. “Team-source your content. Every week, think of topic that your colleagues can contribute towards via their own social media accounts. For example, request your team members to tweet using #Leadership and share relevant content. As a social media manager, you can then retweet or quote your team members tweets and increase interactions. This way, you crowdsource your social media content to a certain extent and save time.”
– Swetha Venkataramani
Manager, Communication & Content at 9lenses
4. “Maintain a content library or spreadsheet of articles that relate to your brand and industry. This includes press that your company received, interesting articles from your company’s team, content from your company blog, and interesting and helpful articles from your field. A spreadsheet can serve as a convenient reference for relevant content that can be re-shared.”
– Leeyen Rogers
VP of Marketing at Jotform
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5. “Keep all of your images in one place. I used to use Dropbox to upload images, but now I use Postmore. It’s an iPhone app that loops in team members to source photos in one place. It’s great when working with a team of interns! You can also use Google Spreadsheets to keep track of relevant links (press mentions, videos, etc) so that you have all your brand content in one place).”
– Angela Hanks
Media & Brand Strategist at Coolhaus
6. “Bookmark content on the fly, and then go back to it when you’re ready to post. I use the Pocket app to easily save articles that our audience may like. It lets me tag and sort based on topic so when I’m ready to go in and bulk schedule my posts I have a bank of content that I can schedule in seconds.”
– Hayley Hudson
Social Media Manager at Yottaa
7. “Work from a handwritten To-Do list every day. Write yours out with three categories in mind – one for things you must get done each day (such as responding to all comments from your followers), a second category for things that need your attention but can wait (like exploring new social sites), and a third category for minor things that you can knock out if you have the extra time, which will vary depending upon the specifics of your position. Whatever you don’t finish gets transferred to the next day’s list.
– Carly Fauth
Director of Marketing & Outreach at MoneyCrashers
8. “Scheduling is key. Unless a business has lots of sales, and those need to be announced continuously throughout the day; marketers should schedule content to be shared a certain number of times a day. This may sound counterintuitive, but you should also consider scaling back your posts. The adage, “Don’t speak unless you have something to say,” is even truer when it comes to social media. Too many people are posting, just to be posting. When they do that, they are watering down their own brand.”
– Sharon Geltner
Business Analyst at SBDC (Palm Beach)
9. “ Write. Everything. Down. I can’t tell you how many times an idea for a post came to me out of nowhere, but I didn’t write it down. Instead, I told myself “I’ll remember that and put it in the content calendar for the next day.” Nope. It didn’t happen, because I completely forgot my idea. Pull out your phone and jot down any ideas you have in your notes. That way, when it’s time to curate content, you already have a plethora of inspired ideas.”
– Amanda Shepherd
Social Media Manager at EllipsesPR
10. “Develop a schedule. Devote 10-20 minutes each morning to reach out and respond on all of your social channels and schedule new content. If you do a daily check-in, you can stay on top of your social accounts without being consumed by them. If you have time, schedule another 10 minute afternoon break to respond to anyone who’s reached out to you since your morning session.”
– Christy Kirk
Director of Social Strategy at Weaving Influence
How you can save a lot of time using DrumUp for social media management
Save time managing your social media accounts
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1. Content curation (specially of use to small businesses) – Curate some content instead of creating all of your content. It’ll not only save you time, but help you attract a niche audience on social media. If you share curated posts along with the hashtags and @mentions suggested by DrumUp, you also stand a chance at building relationships with the people you @mention. After all, people love being mentioned. This could help build an engaged network of wellwishers who you can work with to create buzz on your social media pages.
2. Account grouping (specially of use to social media agencies) – When you have to manage social media accounts of multiple clients, you can expect some confusion. However, you can avoid such confusion by organizing client accounts in groups for easy social media scheduling. You could create a group for each of your client’s multiple social media accounts and then use them to make your content scheduling easier.
3. RSS feed promotion/ auto-posting of your blog content (saves time for businesses of all sizes, freelancers, bloggers and pretty much anybody who has a blog and wants to promote it) – Using DrumUp’s RSS feed integration, you can curate content from your blog and set that stream to automatic publishing so your blog posts are published on time and without fail, without needing your involvement. You could also use “repeat posting” to ensure that your blog posts get maximum exposure and increase your chances of attracting real clients.
4. Content libraries (useful for anyone who wants to save posts for reuse at a later time) – Why spend hours creating social media/blog posts and then use them once before throwing them? You could save them on DrumUp’s content libraries and reuse them to boost traffic generated by them. Content libraries in DrumUp also allow auto-posting so you can maximize the social media engagement and website traffic generated by every post.
5. Photo editing – Instead of going to an external tool for image creation/editing, downloading that image and then uploading it again on your social media management tool, you could quickly create one on DrumUp, while scheduling your social media posts. The tool is very simple to use and can help you quickly turn a stock image into a striking social media graphic. You could even use this secret hack to create a simple, solid-color + text social media image.
- Step 1: Upload a random image using the photo icon on DrumUp (It doesn’t matter what the image is because you will ultimately delete it. You could choose the first one you find on your computer).
- Step 2: Select the object and delete it.
- Step 3: Place an object (circle/rectangle or triangle) as your background and add text. That’s all it takes to create your image!
6. 1-click schedule – DrumUp was one of the first social media management tools to introduce the 1-click schedule feature. You can use it on both curated posts and your own custom posts. Here’s how. The posts in keyword based content suggestion streams and RSS feed based streams plainly show the green 1-click schedule button. But for your own posts, first upload them into a content library and then you can 1-click schedule them from there on a whim.
7. Editable calendar view of queued social media posts – It’s easy to schedule posts and forget about the big picture. But with DrumUp, you can choose any of the connected social media accounts and then click on the calendar view. Once in front of the calendar, you can easily see how many and which posts are going out on each day, even months in advance. To move posts around/delete them, simply choose the post and click on edit to change the publishing date or delete to get rid of the post.
Have you come with any social media management hacks of your own to use your time more effectively? The community of social media managers can benefit from your ideas, so go ahead and share them in the comments below.
