Like any part of business, finding time to effectively manage social media for your business can be difficult and hard to get to grips with. It can be difficult to build up a relevant audience, create creative and engaging content regularly, drive traffic and engagement and maintain a strong social presence. It can be common to see businesses giving up on social media or letting their social media presence drop dramatically after a few months.
Having a social media presence for any business is important but what’s more important, is being able to effectively manage social media for your business.
It can take a long few months to initially get started with knowing how to effectively manage social media for your business. Not only to build your audience up but to get into the habit of creating and taking content and realising what your audience likes to see and what they don’t.
With anything, social media for your business starts with planning. Start by creating a social media strategy in order to give direction and hold your business accountable. Your social media strategy should include your companies mission statement and unique selling point, social media goals and content plan, target audience and roles within this business for social media.
To manage social media for your business it all starts with planning. Create a social media strategy and write it down in order to hold your business accountable and help you manage social media effectively. Your strategy should include a basic company mission statement, content plan and goals. And most importantly, a powerful statement on “why” people would follow you on social media, what kind of content you plan on creating and posting, and what you hope to achieve.
Let’s look at simple ways to effectively manage social media for your business.
Focus Efforts on Selected Social Media Platforms
One of the biggest issues I often see with businesses on social media is them thinking that they need to have a presence on all platforms. Often this can be hard to manage for businesses which then leads to neglected accounts on platforms. With this the business can run the risk of not appearing current and up to date or an audience assuming the company is no longer in business.
Not only will trying to maintain a presence across all platforms be extremely time consuming but often the content will need tailored to specific target groups for each platform. For a lot of businesses this just isn’t sustainable.
It may seem like you are missing out but actually, focusing all of your time and effort into two or three relevant platforms will often give the best return on investment. Tailoring your content for each platform and audience and staying on top of updates and trends across each account is vital.
For example, if you were creating a post about recruitment, the post copy that will grab attention and engagement on LinkedIn will be different to what will work well on Facebook which again will be different to the content that will be needed for TikTok.
Focusing time and efforts on just a few selected social media platforms is what will drive results.
Manage Social Media: Use Your Time Wisely on Social Media
Similar to focusing efforts on selected social media platforms, it’s important to use and delegate your time wisely across the platforms rather than falling into the trap of doom scrolling.
Many small business owners do not have the capacity to manage social media accounts but that doesn’t mean it is something that can be forgotten about. For those short of time, this daily social media management plan should take less than 20 mins.
1. Engagement: 5 minutes
Start with using 5 minutes to engage with your audience on each platform. This involves engaging with the current audience and new target audiences, ensuring comments and messages are replied to in a timely and professional manner and getting involved in industry relevant conversations to build connections and grow brand awareness.
2. Research: 5 minutes
Spend the next 5 minutes carrying out competitor analysis, industry research and gathering consumer feedback. Social insights are an important tool to use across each platform for this.
3. Keeping up with trends: 5 minutes
One that is often missed but is extremely important is time spent on each platform to remain current with social trends. From trending topics, popular audio and reactive content, this is vital to be able to create trending content and get more involved with the desired audience.
4. Review content calendar and story content: 5 minutes
Lastly, spend the remaining 5 minutes reviewing the remaining content calendar for the month and reviewing the post that is going live that day if there is any. This is also a good opportunity to post any story content, this doesn’t need to be as planned out as grid posts and can offer more insight and personality into the business.
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