When you first start promoting yourself on social media, it is easy to get overwhelmed. Most social media networks never sleep, so there is pressure to maintain a constant online presence. Unless you have a large social media team by your side, this is a next-to-impossible task. If you want to start getting the most out of your social media marketing campaign, use these three tips to help you simplify and step up your game at the same time.
Decide Which Networks Bring You the Most Benefits
While businesses should have active, verified profiles on several social networks, they don’t need to rely on all of them to get traffic. Trying to update Twitter ten times per day, moderate your Facebook group, and respond to comments on Pinterest can eat up a lot of time, especially if you are trying to run a business in between.
Instead of trying to dominate all of the networks, focus your efforts on a few and automate the rest. If you aren’t sure where to start, try the biggest one first: Facebook. Create a page for your business, a stunning profile, and join a few groups. As you build your online presence, monitor the results.
If you already have multiple accounts on social networks, monitor your traffic and engagement levels closely. Choose one or two that are bringing you the best results. Remember, you don’t have to completely abandon the other networks. Dedicate an hour a day to your top performers to continue to see results from your campaign.
Start Automating
Almost all of your social media activity can be automated and placed into a platform for easy access. One of the most important tools business owners have is automation services. These services allow you to automatically update your social networks when you make a new blog post and help you schedule messages, tweets, and posts in advance. This is a huge time saver, making it possible for your accounts to be active without logging in on any given day.
To get fully set up with automation:
- Determine how often you need to post – to succeed on social media, you need to always appear active and fresh. Monitor how many posts per day your competitors are doing and research normal behaviors for the networks you are on. On Facebook, for example, one or two posts per day are common. On Twitter or Pinterest, more posts are needed to help you stay at the top of search results.
- Set up an auto-posting service – choose a service that allows you to automatically post site updates to social media and allows you to schedule posts well in advance.
- Write out your posts – write out your posts in advance, keeping in mind your blogging schedule. For example, if you plan on writing one blog post per day, write one social media status update so you have a total of two. Try to make them 140 characters or less. Try to get on a regular schedule, such as writing your posts once a week or once a month.
- Choose your peak posting times – set your automation service to post your updates during peak hours to help you get the most attention. Noon and five are popular choices for sites like LinkedIn and Facebook. Sites that require more frequent posts, such as Twitter or Pinterest, are usually scheduled hourly between 1 p.m. and 10 p.m. Keep in mind that every industry and network is different.
- Send your posts to all networks – send your updates to all the networks that you have a presence on automatically. Focus on sticking with the schedule that best suits your main social media account. If your main account requires several messages, you can opt to only have half of them sent to other networks to avoid flooding your page.
Manually Log In and Connect
While automation can help produce results fast, it is also important to remember that social media is all about making a human connection. You still need to engage with your potential clients. Log in to check your notifications and respond to people at least once Monday through Friday. This will help you keep up with the connections that you’ve made and improve your overall user experience.
Social networks that aren’t critical to your campaign can be checked less, but they should still be checked at least once per week. More people are using social media as an outlet for customer service, and responding to complaints or questions makes you look more involved. It shows you care about problems and can help you diffuse a negative situation.
If you have dozens of social media accounts that are all critical to your campaign, you should consider investing in social media marketing software that allows you to access all of your notifications at once. This can make responding to customers and boosting engagement much easier.
Use On-Site Advertising Tools
Boosting your posts and tweets can be a great way to get more followers. To keep things very simple, take advantage of the tools available on each network. Both Facebook Ads and Twitter Ads have become more sophisticated over the past few years, allowing you to better target users based on your goal. Even smaller networks, such as Pinterest and Instagram, have developed programs that can help businesses truly shine.
Simplifying social media doesn’t have to be difficult.
Much success,
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