Ways to Save Time On Social Media

Time is money. You know that phrase all too well as a small business owner, and if you’re promoting your business on social media, you know how quickly it can become a time suck. Here are some tips to gain back those hours you’re spending each week on social media so you have more time to do other important things.

1. Have a Strategy

The main struggles with social media marketing are:

1. What networks to post on
2. When to post
3. What to post

Having a strategy in place means you’ll stop wasting time figuring these 3 things out. Determine the networks you want to focus on (Remember: you don’t need to be everywhere) and the type of content you want to share. Have a plan in place so you know what to do moving forward.

2. Schedule Time to do Social Media Tasks

It’s incredibly easy to get sidetracked on social media, so if you don’t have time scheduled to do social media tasks, you could find yourself wasting time browsing instead of actually doing. Schedule a few hours one day a week to get all things related to social media done. Whether it’s taking photos, scheduling posts, or writing content, dedicating time each week helps keep you accountable, so you’ll get more done.

3. Use a Scheduling Tool

Instead of manually creating posts for each platform daily, use a scheduling tool to create a weeks worth of posts in a few hours. Not only will these tools help you save time, but they will help you be consistent, a huge factor to being successful on social media. We use Buffer and Planoly to schedule our posts.

4. Use Templates

Each social network has an ideal image size for posts. Instead of wasting time creating these posts manually, make one template that you can use over and over again. Not only will this tip help save you tons of hours, it will also give your social networks a consistent, branded look.

5. Recycle Content

There’s nothing wrong with sharing the same piece of content multiple times on multiple social networks. Since social media moves so fast, it’s actually a good idea to share the same content multiple times, so your followers can see interesting content they may have missed otherwise. Share links to older blog posts, re-pin older pins and don’t be afraid to use the same images on Instagram (just change out the captions).

Save yourself some time by using the above tips to streamline your social media.