In the world of a small business owner, time management can mean the difference between success and failure. Unfortunately, when you look at your schedule and attempt to fit a social media marketing schedule into a schedule packed with staff meetings, in-office hours and promotional events, it can appear as if there simply isn’t time to manage your social media presence let alone find time for a lunch break. While it may appear complicated, adding social media marketing to your schedule doesn’t have to difficult or time consuming. By utilizing these tips along you can improve your brand’s social media presence and actively engage your audience without having to make major adjustments to your normal routine.
Social Media Marketing Requires Goals
In order to develop a social media marketing schedule, you first have to understand what your goals are and exactly how you’re going to achieve them. You’ve likely developed an annual marketing schedule to plan out your workshops, monthly newsletters or client appreciation events, monthly specials and other events in an effort to achieve certain goals each month, and your social media schedule is simply an extension of the steps you need to take to reach those goals.
When you start working on your social media marketing schedule, you’ll be setting yourself up for success by scheduling content, promotions and status updates to promote your upcoming events, share useful information and engage your fans and followers. With this social media schedule, in less than 2 hours per week, you will be able to:
- Post actively throughout the week to multiple social networks
- Share relevant information to educate your fans and followers
Schedule Two Hours Each Week for Social Media
The overall goal of utilizing this social media strategy is to maintain an active presence on social media without taking up more than two hours of your schedule each week. In order for that to happen, you have to determine at what time each week you’ll dedicate 2 hours of your time to working on your social media.
After you’ve chosen a time each week, pull up your Google Calendar or your calendar of choice, and set up a recurring event for that day of the week and ensure that you’ll have that two hours blocked off each week. These two hours of each week will be dedicated to:
- Finding content to share for the following week
- Scheduling posts to share on your social networks for the following week
- Writing short blog posts to educated your fans
Find Content worth Sharing
One of the most important things you can do as a small business owner is use your social media accounts as a means to educate your clients and prospects on what you do, what’s happening each week in the news and share great information that will improve your prospects lives simply by following you on social media.. To do that, you need to share content from reliable online news sources that your fans will be interested in reading. As a small business owner, you should be keeping up with the news, so you should be able to find content worth sharing.
Schedule Your Favorite News and Blog Articles of the Week
If you’re actively following weekly news related to your business, you should have no problem finding great content to share each week. When you come across a great article on a news website or from an email newsletter, record that article, a summary of its content and the URL on your schedule template to be used for the following week. By the end of the week, you will have plenty of content worth sharing.
Set Up Google Alerts for Your Industry Keywords
Google offers a tool called Google Alerts, which will take a lot of the work out of finding content for you, by sending you links based on keywords that you’ve determined. For my work schedule, you can see that I’ve setup Google Alerts to send me news articles that include the words “annuities” and “retirement.” Anytime a news article about one of the keywords is posted online, Google Alerts will send me the links to the article so I can read through it and share it if it’s relevant to my readers. Google Alerts is a great way to get important news information about your niche without having to do a lot of research or consuming a lot of your time.
To use Google Alerts, simply visit http://www.google.com/alerts, enter your search query, determine what type of sources you’d like to receive information from, frequency and the email you’d like these alerts sent to. Set up an alert for your most important keywords and then create a rule using your email program so that all of your Google Alerts are stored in one location. Be careful, if you set up your alerts to notify you as things happen, you will receive way more content then you could possibly use.
Keep Up With Your Competition
One of the easiest ways to find great content to share with your friends is to keep an eye on your competition. You’ve likely heard talk about who’s successfully using social media to promote their business, so keep an eye on what they’re doing. Like their Facebook pages, follow them on Twitter and pay attention to what they share. If they share a great news article, schedule it for your own page to share with your fans. If they wrote a great blog post about a topic you think your fans will like, check out their sources and write your own version, just don’t plagiarize their content.
When you start paying more attention to your competitors, whether their from across the country or your local area, you may start noticing techniques that they use aside from content sharing that you can use to help promote your own business. There’s nothing wrong with utilizing ideas that you get from your competitors, they’re probably keeping a close eye on what you’re doing as well, so it should create some friendly competition.
Pre-Schedule Your Updates a Week in Advance
Once you’ve found great content worth sharing and you’ve written down the information on your social media schedule template, you will have no trouble at all getting posts scheduled for the following week. To make this task easier, you need to utilize a social media management tool. Social media management tools allow you to manage multiple social media profiles from one location, preschedule status updates and interact with your fans and followers. There are dozens of SMM tool options available, but the two most impressive and cost effective options are Hootsuite and Sprout Social.
- Hootsuite: Hootsuite is probably the most used and best known social media management tool out there. While the interface takes a bit of getting used to, it’s cost (absolutely free) makes it the best, most affordable and functional option available for someone looking to manage their social profiles in one place.
- Sprout Social: Sprout Social offers one of the best looking and most advance SMM platforms out their, and the monthly cost is relatively low compared to tools like Hubspot. While there is no free option available outside of their 30 day trial, they level of control and powerful analytics and reporting tools that they offer make sure you’ll have a competitive edge over your competitors and complete control over your campaigns.
Either of the above mentioned tools will allow you schedule your content in advance. Using your SMM tool and your social media schedule template, setup at least one posting per day to all of your social media profiles.
Conclusion
Creating and maintaining a social media marketing schedule doesn’t have to be difficult and doesn’t have to eat away at your weekly schedule. By simply setting aside 2 hours per week to seek out great news articles, create interesting content and pre-schedule your posts a week in advance, you can maintain and active social media presence to promote your business without crowding your weekly schedule.
How do you create and manage your own social media marketing schedule? What advice would you offer to others who are trying to create their own? Share your thoughts and ideas by leaving a comment below!
How to Manage Your Social Media Marketing Schedule in 2 Hours a Week
No comments:
Post a Comment