Do you sit down to manage social media marketing and then you feel overwhelmed with having to post to several platforms? Do you ask yourself how should I deal with my tweets today or post to Facebook and when am I going to find time to do all of this? We all know that to be visible to our niche and get potential clients into our sales funnel, we need to be on and manage social media. The challenge is that with all of these different platforms how do you manage all of the pieces to ensure that everything runs smoothly?
This is particularly a challenge if you do not have a lot of time to devote to social media. However, social media is a key element of getting prospective clients into your sales funnel and because of this, it deserves the highest attention.
I use several platforms to manage social media management both for my business and for my clients but primarily Hootsuite is my platform of choice and I will tell you why later. However, there are other considerations you should be aware of that will help the job to be easier. Here are 5 things you need to consider.
- Determine which platform you need to be on – As you know there are various platforms but you do not need to be on all of them. Who is your niche? Where do they hang out? It makes no sense at all spending valuable time driving marketing on social media platforms where your potential clients do not exist. This is a basic requirement for marketing so if you are not quite sure yet who your potential customer is, you will need to pause and give this some consideration.
- Get a Social Media Content Calendar – If you struggle to figure out what you are going to post to social media then you need a social media content calendar to manage social media. Having a calendar means that you would be able to strategically think about what you are going to schedule and post weeks in advance. The overwhelm that comes with trying to figure what to post on a daily basis disappears. Completing this calendar will help you to stay on top of posting to social media.
- Consider who will provide your copy – it is one thing to be able to schedule the content for posting online. However, you need to think about who will provide the content to post on the various platforms. It could be that you require research to be done on a certain topic in order to provide compelling content. Will you really have the time to do this and help manage social media?
- Explore the scheduling platforms available
- Hootsuite – Most people who are serious about managing their social media on multiple platforms are using Hootsuite. You are able to post your content one time and your posts will automatically appear on your designated platforms when you need this to happen. If you want to change the automatic schedule, you can adjust this to one that works for you. You can sign up for free with 3 platforms being included and there are paid versions as well. There are so many features with Hootsuite which includes the many streams you can set up on the platform. Then with Twitter, you can add things like mentions and hashtags to name a few. You can respond to mentions etc within Hootsuite. You can save drafts on Hootsuite and there is also a link shortener which is extremely helpful. Because it has been around for many years, the good thing is that it has a lot of credibility in the market. It does take a while to get use to the dashboard but do persevere with it. Just give it a try.
- Buffer – This is another platform which is quite popular and is like a virtual queuing system which pushes your social media content throughout the day. This platform is a little bit more simpler. Buffer provides feeds which helps with marketing your blog posts and there are various keyboard shortcuts to speed up social sharing. There is a Browser extension which makes very quick and easy to schedule multiple messages across different times and accounts. An interesting addition to Buffer is Pablo which makes it easy for you to overlay quotes and text onto images. If you use Instagram, then Buffer supports this platform perfectly. One of the downsides is that you cannot view your Twitter feed from the dashboard. The free plan is quite limited so if you are going to use Buffer we would suggest opting for the paid version.
- Getting help to manage social media on multiple platforms
If you are still overwhelmed with managing all of the pieces then I would suggest that you get some support to do this. Managing social media can be a real time suck. You have to be “in it to win it” but is this the best use of your time? Using a Virtual Assistant to help you to manage the various elements of social media marketing has got to be the better option. You can pass elements of this to your VA to deal with including engagement and building your followers.
So you may be wondering, how is it that you can actually save time and money with social media by using a VA?
Do get in touch to arrange a 15 minute discovery session to find out how.
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