How to be more productive on social media? It’s not always easy, but it is possible. Social Media experts share their secrets for staying focused and avoiding distractions while using the platforms they love. Social media is a great way to reach out to people and market your product or service. However, it can also be overwhelming when trying to keep up with all the posts. To be more productive on social media, educate yourself social media. Content, goods, and social media foundations most marketing campaigns. While it isn’t necessary to use social media to expand a company, it may undoubtedly assist in most circumstances. In 2014, an overwhelming 92 percent of marketers said they put a high emphasis on social media. Social media enables you to contact practically everyone in today’s marketing environment, regardless of your company’s specialization. However, just because marketers understand the value of social media doesn’t imply they know how to make it work for them. Many people put in many hours every week to earn a little return on their investment (ROI). Statista conducted a poll to determine how much time marketers spend on social media each week:
As you can see, every year, an increasing number of marketers spend a significant amount of time on social media (16+ hours per week). However, it isn’t simply marketers who engage in this behavior; CEOs do. According to another poll, 43% of CEOs spend more than 6 hours each week on social media.
Year after year, CEOs and marketers would not spend this much time on social media unless it yielded results. Yes, it does. But don’t you believe a CEO has more important things to accomplish than send out Tweets and “like” Facebook posts? Yes, I do. I can’t justify spending more than 6 hours a week on social media since the return on investment is insufficient. Despite this, I use social media to promote my blog pieces and guest blogs. I just don’t waste any more time than is required. In this piece, I’ll show you six alternative techniques to save time on social media so you can concentrate on other aspects of your company. Let’s get started.
1. Batching is always the winner.
My favorite marketers, SEOs, entrepreneurs, and authors work in groups. Batching is a “productivity hack” that organizations have utilized for many years to boost productivity in many ways. The principle is straightforward:
Do a job all at once over a more extended period instead of executing it at regular or irregular periods (e.g., a week or a month). The longer the period, the more significant the increase in production. It is beneficial for the following three reasons:
- It cuts down on transition time – It takes a few seconds or minutes to figure out where you are, what you need to accomplish, and how you’ll get started whenever you start a task. When you batch, you just concentrate on one activity at a time, which eliminates any wasted transition time.
- It makes things easier — It’s tiring to switch between many things during the day. It’s less scary when you know you have a few primary chores to do in a day (in more enormous bunches).
- You can work more quickly — Switching between different tasks requires repeated shifts in concentration. You lose whatever momentum you’ve built up every time you change your focus. You’ll never be able to get “in the zone.”
One last advantage of batching is that it makes it more difficult to overlook anything. Batching helps you plan ahead of time to don’t neglect critical tasks. Of course, it’s a social media or blog post in this scenario. There are a few methods to employ batching to save time when it comes to social networking. Way 1: Generate a slew of post ideas at once: I suggest brainstorming as many social media post ideas as possible (the same goes for blog post ideas as well). You aim to amass a large pool of social media post ideas from which you may draw as needed. What methods do you use to generate ideas? It depends on which social media platforms you choose to devote your time to (more on that shortly).
Your blog articles are a natural supply of material, and they’ll help you draw people back to your site. You want to provide other things that your viewers may be interested in besides your content. Way 2: Create a regular posting schedule: Logging into each network and uploading an updated one at a time is one of the most common ways marketers squander time on social media. You may save a lot of time by scheduling all of your articles at the beginning of the week or month. Of course, if anything unexpected occurs throughout the week or month, you may make minor modifications. Each blog article you create should be shared at least once:
Prepare and include posts for any new blog entries you will be releasing when scheduling shares for the coming week or month. CoSchedule’s basic sharing design for blog articles is one of my favorites:
Way 3 – Only use social media at specific hours: Another common pitfall for marketers is monitoring their social media accounts for changes regularly. If you do it this way, you may squander a lot of time and get very little in return. Email and social media have a lot in common. It’s tempting to check it often to see whether anything has arrived. However, you must be methodical in your approach. Check and respond to crucial postings and messages on social media at one or two-day intervals, each lasting 10-15 minutes. You’d be shocked at what you can do when setting strict boundaries. Some of you may argue that 42 percent of users anticipate a response on social media within 60 minutes of contacting customer service.
If you’re receiving many support requests on social media, you should be able to pay someone to handle it for you. So don’t spend your time on an essential exercise that virtually anybody can do. Instead, allow them to notify you if anything requires your immediate attention.
2. Know what you’re attempting to achieve.
Social media is a time-waster for the average public, but it shouldn’t be if you’re using it for business. You shouldn’t be scrolling through a stream of updates to see what’s new when you check into Twitter, Facebook, or whichever network(s) you use. Your social media effort should have a single goal. What’s the point of having a social media presence? Are you attempting to increase your following? While it varies for every network, the basic guideline for obtaining followers on social media is to follow people first (a part will return the favor) and then offer compelling material to keep them from unfollowing you later. This is usually the principal objective of any firm that has just started using social media. While it may seem cynical, you may achieve this aim without worrying about your “feed” or followers for the time being. You may also do your assignment in under 10 minutes each day if you batch your post ideas once a week or month and utilize tools to help you follow people rapidly. Here are some previous tutorials that can help you get more followers on various social media platforms, beginning with Facebook: Boost your LinkedIn following: Increase the number of people who follow you on Pinterest: Get more Instagram followers by doing the following: Are you attempting to increase traffic and generate leads? The most typical motivation for a company to utilize social media is to attract visitors to their website and turn that traffic into leads. This is a very reasonable objective. Obtaining followers is a need for this. After a few thousand, you can start bringing good traffic back to your website. Most of your traffic will come from regularly publishing links to your blog entries (or other content). You may do this in as little as 10 minutes every day. To increase traffic, you may also comment on individual posts made by other people or contribute information inside groups. Sharing information inside groups may generate a lot of traffic, but it can’t be done regularly. You may do it anytime you want; just incorporate it into your one or two daily social media hours. To boost traffic, commenting on individual pieces is a whole different method. While it may have some effects, it is mostly ineffective. The strategy is simple: look for keywords and queries in your area, then respond with a link to your site. For example, if I wanted to promote my post on the 22 best Gmail plugins, I would do a search on social media for “what is the greatest Gmail plugin”:
Then I may respond with a link to my article (and an answer). While this seems to be an excellent concept at first, you’ll spend 5 minutes just trying to develop one 1-to three decent (related) questions to respond to. Each response will only bring in one or two visitors. This is OK while you’re just getting started with a website, but it’s a waste of time for most people due to the low return on investment. Are you attempting to form bonds with others? The capacity to communicate with nearly anybody is another beneficial characteristic of social networking. It was difficult to contact influencers before the rise of social media. You may now send them public messages, share their material, and engage in social media interactions with them. When done with a purpose, interaction may be beneficial. The issue is that most marketers just follow several influencers and connect with them at random. Your plan should be considerably more specific. Choose a small group of influencers you’d want to form a bond with. As Brian Dean puts it, make a “hit list” of influencers.
Then, during your regular social media time, go out of your way to find their posts and communicate with them.
3. Concentrate and save time by narrowing your focus.
Marketers and entrepreneurs look for opportunities in unexpected places. It’s a terrific quality to have if you can see the potential in everything. Most of these folks (like you) have the issue of taking on more than they can handle. They attempt to solve every problem and seize every opportunity, but they quickly burn out and fail to make any genuine progress. You won’t be able to completely take advantage of anyone’s chance if you spread yourself too thin. Consistency is crucial when it comes to anything like social networking. You won’t be productive on any of the networks if you attempt to be active on five or six. Start with one or two networks, and if all goes well, add another after a few months. You’ll note that I concentrate on no more than three social networks on each of my blogs:
If you’ve been following my nutrition case study site, you’ll notice that I (and Mike) are only concentrating on one social media platform: Facebook.
You’ll know that Facebook accounted for almost all our first traffic if you’ve been following along. If you use the appropriate method to use social media, you can create a lot of traffic. So, how do you decide which network(s) to concentrate on? You may figure it out using a variety of approaches. Option 1: Monitor your competitors: In 99.9% of niches, there will already be some kind of rivalry. Choose one (or a few) of your rivals’ domains and enter them into Buzzsumo’s top content tool:
Even with a free account, this will return five or so results of your competitor’s most popular material. By default, it should be ordered by “total shares” (note the down arrow beneath the header), but if it isn’t, click that heading. Examine the top results to identify which networks account for most of the shares. For example, over 90% of the shares in the model above originated from Facebook. You may concentrate on a single network when it is so dominating. As a general guideline, if a network contributes 25% or more of the total shares, it’s generally worth paying attention to. You may input additional competitors to double-check since there may be irregularities when looking at one site. Alternatively, you may use the tool to search for a particular term. I put in “healthy eating” in this case:
I got the same results as everyone else. For all top outcomes, Facebook shares outnumbered all other networks. Option 2: Select a demographic-based channel: Another way to figure out which social network to use is to look at your target audience’s demographics, such as:
- age
- gender
- income
- education
- location
Here’s how to figure out who your target audience is. You may choose a network that fits your audience since we know the demographics of each social channel:
You can always play it safe and remain with Facebook, but LinkedIn could be a better option if you operate a company that caters to highly educated, high-income customers. Option 3: Select a channel depending on the kind of content: Finally, based on the material you want to create, you may choose the best social network to concentrate on. If you’re an artist or decorator who works in a primarily visual field, you’ll want to utilize a visual platform. Different networks support different sorts of material:
The optimal network may vary from your rivals, depending on your specialty. As a result, if you’re going to use technique #1, you’ll need to choose a close competition. A nutrition website, for example, may concentrate on incredibly visual recipes. Pinterest, Instagram, and Facebook are all excellent alternatives. Another nutrition website, such as the case study website, may include text and graphics. It works well on social media sites like Facebook and Google+. Finally, another nutrition website may concentrate on providing culinary videos with step-by-step instructions. YouTube comes to mind as an obvious possibility.
4. You’ll pay the price if you don’t make a calendar.
It’s effortless to dismiss social media. There will be no immediate consequences if you miss a few posts here and there. But, as I previously said, consistency is the most critical aspect of social media success. If you want to utilize social media to build your company, you’ll need a social media calendar (or timetable). The calendar will help you stay on schedule, stay consistent, and monitor your progress. If you want to track your development and ROI, you’ll need to keep track of your outcomes. It’s entirely up to you to build up a social media plan or timetable. However, I’ll show you a few other possibilities to help you figure out how you want yours to appear. Option 1: Use a spreadsheet: Spreadsheets are very adaptable, so that they can be used in almost any industry. Some of the social media schedule spreadsheets I’ve seen are insanely convoluted…
as well as a few basic spreadsheets…
Depending on how frequently you use social media and how much information you want to put into it, either one may work well. When you use a spreadsheet calendar, you can plan everything at once (batch it!) and then schedule it all at once when you’re through. Option 2: Use Buffer: Buffer is a popular social media scheduling platform that enables you to plan articles with little effort. After you’ve created an account and signed in, go to “Schedule.”
Then choose the “content” tab from the main menu. You will be able to select a network due to this (on the left). Then you may enter your contribution.
When you’re finished, you may add it to your post queue. You may go into your line at any moment and rearrange or modify posts.
Buffer’s advantage is that you’ll never have to worry about forgetting or missing a date again after you’ve established those first publishing timings. Buffer also integrates with all of the leading social media platforms, including Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+, and Pinterest. Alternative 3 – Use Hootsuite: Another option is to use Hootsuite, the industry leader in social networking tools until Buffer arrives. When it comes to scheduling, you’ll want to utilize Hootsuite’s bulk schedule option:
When you choose “bulk message uploader,” you will be prompted to submit a CSV file (a type of spreadsheet). You’ll need to make this spreadsheet ahead of time. The spreadsheet should be completed in the following order: date, message, and link. There is one for each column. Because the date must be put in one of two forms, the first column is the most difficult. You’ll need to adjust your default date settings since they’re likely to vary from the essential ones. If you’re using Google Docs, make a note of the first column and then go to: “Format > Number > More Formats > More date and time formats.”
A pop-up window will appear. First, pick each date element (day, month, etc.) in the proper sequence using the little dropdown arrow (seen below):
Between the day, month, and year, you’ll need to add a single “/” and a single space between the year and the hour. Finally, separate the hour and minute fields with a colon. When you’re finished, click Apply to save your changes. It becomes a lot simpler from here. In the next column, type your message (complete with hashtags). Finally, in the final column, type in the appropriate links. It might be an entire URL or one that has been shortened:
The bulk uploader does not allow you to add photographs to your postings, which is the tool’s biggest drawback. On Facebook, posts with photos get 53% more likes than those without. Images may assist increase engagement by a significant amount depending on the network, but they can generally help increase engagement significantly. Option 4: Use CoSchedule: The last tool you may use is CoSchedule, which is easy to use and works well with WordPress. Once you’ve installed it, go to your admin dashboard and choose the “Calendar” menu option:
It displays a standard calendar, but it also tells you when you have planned social network posts (which will happen automatically). You may submit a status update by clicking on a day and dragging it to a different day if necessary:
5. Use tools to track mentions.
Rather than fiddling with each unique network, employ technologies to track down when a reader or customer mentions you. Because they are usually crucial messages, it’s good to keep an eye on them and then respond to them throughout your social media sessions. Option 1: Use Mention.com to search for your brand: Similar to Google Alerts, but with a concentration on social media. You specify a keyword (such as your brand name) when you register an account, and it will automatically monitor social media sites for any references. You may have it send you an email every day with the results:
Option2: Use Hootsuite to track mentions automatically: Monitoring mentions is one of Hootsuite’s most notable features. You may add keywords to each network, and it will keep track of your observations:
In your main Hootsuite dashboard, you can view a live stream of all your mentions for keywords or your username:
Get email notifications for Reddit mentions as a bonus: Reddit isn’t often thought of as a social media platform, but more and more marketers see its value. If you’re unfamiliar with Reddit, check out my tutorial on Reddit marketing. The majority of social networking tools are incompatible with Reddit. However, there is a method for you to get an email whenever a term is mentioned on the site (your brand name or a keyword). This necessitates the usage of IFTTT, a free program that stands for “If This, Then That.” You may define the event (the “this”) as well as the action (the “that”) on IFTTT. Processes may be automated using it. In this scenario, we’ll instruct it to send you an email (the “that”) whenever a particular term (the “this”) is spoken. Fortunately, you can put it up fast by using this pre-made formula. This will prompt you to provide permission to utilize information from your Reddit account in a tiny window. Please grant this request:
Return to the recipe page and enter your trigger word. In the example below, I’d want to get notified whenever the term “quicksprout.com” is used. Below that text box is a link that will allow you to search for items other than site names.
Finally, click “Add” to activate the recipe at the bottom of the page.
And that’s all there is to it!
6. Templates are the foundation of productivity.
A great deal of social media jobs is monotonous. You’ll notice that most of your top posts have the same appearance and that most of your posts fall into just a few categories. Using templates may save you a lot of time and effort. Use a social media report template to automate reports: It’s good to construct a social media report template if you have a boss to report to or frequent meetings where you evaluate social media outcomes.
This template should include a summary of your social media activities and the outcomes for a certain period. Buffer has graciously made it available to you for free if you like the one above. To make writing articles go quicker, use headline formulas: I’ve written multiple times on how to write compelling headlines. While headlines are most crucial for blog entries, you also need to make attractive titles for your other social media posts if you want them to garner much attention. You may reuse effective headline templates instead of attempting to come up with notable titles every time you work on social media post ideas. Here are a few instances of headline formulae in action:
- The ‘s secret
- What you should know about
- What is the best way to
- There are different methods to accomplish this.
You can simply compose 10-20 social media post headlines in a minute if you have a substantial list of formulae. Here are a few decent places to look for headline formulae: Create visual templates with Canva: If you want to generate a lot of interaction on social media, you’ll need to utilize photos on practically every platform. However, instead of hiring a designer or developing a shot from scratch, you may use Canva’s social media-specific templates. When you log in, you’ll be presented with various template possibilities. While you may make a photo from scratch (“use custom measurements”), choosing a template for your preferred social media platform is more convenient.
When you choose the sort of image you wish to create, a new canvas with the appropriate dimensions for your network will appear:
By default, the layouts pane on the left will be chosen. Choose whatever template you desire, and it will appear on the right-hand canvas. You may then alter any of the image components (background, text, symbols, etc.) by clicking on them:
When you’re finished, go to the top menu bar and choose “download.” Once you’ve gotten the hang of it, you’ll be able to make great-looking photographs in under two minutes. In addition, you can complete all of your pictures for the month in just a few hours if you batch your image production (which is strongly advised).
Conclusion
Almost every company may benefit from having a solid social media presence. However, as with any other aspect of your company, you must ensure that it provides a decent return on your time and money. You won’t be able to get a consistent ROI if you spend several hours a week aimlessly meandering around the forest of social media. Use the ways I’ve shown you in this post to simplify your social media activities, and you’ll discover that managing your social media accounts takes just a few hours every week. Furthermore, if you’re crystal clear on your objectives and purpose, you’ll probably see more outstanding outcomes. I’ve also produced an infographic to show you how to be more productive on the social web to further assist you in reducing the number of hours you spend on social networks.
Frequently Asked Questions
How can I be productive on social media?
A: You can be more productive on social media by setting up a routine. Do not over-expose yourself, as this will only undermine your self-esteem and damage your relationship with others.
Does the use of social media make your life productive?
A: Yes, social media use makes your life more productive because you can connect to people who share similar interests and ideas.
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