As part of our National Work Life Week we’re bringing you a weeks’ worth of blogs on Time Management for Social Media

There is is no denying Social Media is ESSENTIAL for businesses, but it’s reported that 80% of Businesses Who Spend Large Amounts Of Time using Social Media for their business don’t win a significant amount of or any business from their activity

Over the past few years we’ve seen various sensationalistic headlines about how you can manage your Social Media in under 10 minutes a day – the truth is those claims don’t stack up in reality

However you can manage your Social Media in about 4 hours a week which means around 30 minutes day

Here are some Time Management Tips For Social Media to keep your time low and your results high

1. Discover Your Why?
Dabbling is the enemy of any business decision and until you discover your WHY – the very reason you are using social media – it’s obvious you will spend unnecessary time delivering an unstructured seemingly random marketing message

So why are you using social media? Usually the answer is something vague like “I’ve been told I should be on it, but I don’t really like it” or “My web designer set it up for me and told me to use it”

Try writing down very specific goals such as

* I want to increase my monthly retained clients by 1 extra client each month for the next 3 months
* Weekend trade we are full to capacity – but I wish to increase weekday trade by 30% a day
* I went to use Social Media to push this underused, but highly profitable service by 1 new client a week

Once you have your why, it helps focus on the sort of marketing messages you will be delivering, the content you will need for that and the sort of followers you want to attract as a result

Suddenly by doing this – you spend a lot less time dabbling and lot more time delivering

2. Plan Ahead
Although it may be delivered to look spontaneous – our clients marketing campaigns are planned in detail at least 2 or 3 months ahead down to the specifics of the week and day

Having a plan for your social media a few months ahead so you don’t waste time day to day is absolutely essential and allows you to plan for the minutia of your marketing message

Social Media is often about breaking down your message into bite size chunks and looking in advance at all those special dates you can tie in with, which make your business different from others, is a great way of doing this.

Planning in advance also allows you to look at your business marketing holistically and see where you may need to use printed material to enhance your social media marketing

3. Schedule SOME of Your Updates
Around 30% of our Social Media updates are scheduled in advance, whether it be at the beginning of the week or the beginning of a day

That means we get the key messages out there, while being “live” and “responsive” enough to engage and post 70% of our updates in real time

There’s a debate as to whether scheduled updates are authentic, but in a world where 5 minutes is precious, using tools such as Hootsuite, Buffer, Tweetdeck, Postplanner etc is an essential business tool so you can deliver a message while still focusing on other areas of your business

Scheduling also allows you to keep a consistent message rather than the machine gun approach of sending too many tweets in a very short period of time when you log in

4. Don’t Be a Slave To Social Media
Social Media can be one big time suck – how many times have you logged in at 8pm to check what’s happening on twitter / facebook and found yourself still there 3 hours later?

Set yourself a time limit for social as you would do any other business task and stick to it – social media for business is completely different than social media for friends and family and should be treated as thus

If you set yourself a 10 minute time limit 3 times a day – you will make the most productive use of that time rather than always being online

You can manage your Social Media in 30 mins a day – don’t waste unnecessary time on twitter hours each night

5. Monitor Each Weeks Highs and Lows
Spent 30 minutes at the end of each week analysing the past 7 days updates and see which platforms / messages worked and which ones fell on deaf ears

Social Media is an important marketing tool for business and if you’d spent 4 hours a week working on a traditional marketing campaign you’d be monitoring the results of that. Why not social media?

When monitoring always go back to the why? and look at the previous 4 points to check you’re still on the right path

If you do the above you’ll be spending less time on social media, but winning more business

For those that want a helping hand we offer 121 Half Days Social Media Training Sessions

And for those who would rather outsource their Social Media – we offered a Social Media Management Service

For more info click the links above or call Alex on 07806774279 or email alex@altrinchamhq.co.uk

Altrincham Hq

“With over 12 years experience of Social Media and 17 years experience of online marketing in other companies, clients come to myself when they want a veteran rather than a rookie” Alex McCann