I love social media, but I acknowledge it can be time-consuming. Sometimes I find myself losing hours reading great content and keeping up on the latest news 140 characters at a time. If you’re a small business owner, you probably feel like you don’t have enough hours in the day to grow your business let alone tweet, post, like, share and pin on social media. You may even hate social media entirely.
At Duct Tape Marketing, we’re all about creating systems that help you execute your marketing tasks quickly and get back to running your business. John created a robust system that hit all of the important aspects of social media some time ago, but it does require some love and attention. For all you haters out there, it may be too much.
But, with a few handy tools, you can develop a quick social media routine that will help you reach your goals. Here are three steps that even the biggest hater can use to rock social media in less than 20 minutes a day.
Automatically Share Your Content
Your # 1 focus for your social media routine should be to drive traffic to your blog. You should make it a part of your posting routine to share your new content on social media. You can save a little time by installing a Wordpress plugin like Jetpack Publicize to share directly from your Wordpress dashboard. You can even adjust your settings, so the post is shared automatically as soon as you publish.
Est. Time Per Day: If installed as part of your content posting routine, less than 2 Minutes.
Schedule Updates
Social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook live in the moment, so to speak. Posts don’t last long in your customers’ timelines, and they don’t often go searching for past posts. That’s why your social media success relies upon your ability to post and share frequently when your customers are most active.
That would require multiple posts at peak times throughout the day but that’s far too time-consuming.
Luckily there are several social media tools you can use to pre-write and schedule your posts, including Hootsuite, Tweetdeck, and Buffer.
These tools will also give you the opportunity to schedule several posts promoting your new content posts throughout the day. Social media is more popular in the afternoons after work, so take advantage of that knowledge and make sure you promote your blog posts then, regardless of when you publish.
Don’t even want to write the posts? Use Emphatic and you’ll get a number of social posts handwritten for you, and can approve and schedule them directly from their dashboard. They’ll even collect content from a list of blogs of your choosing, and create posts to share that content. It’s almost as if you don’t have to do social media at all.
Est. Time Per Day: 8 minutes for plenty of social posts. Less if you use post creation services like Emphatic.
Share Content
One of the best ways to spread your social influence is to share content from other influencers. Take a few moments a day to read a blog post or two from influencers in your industry and share what you read on social media.
To save time finding posts to share, you can set up Twitter lists of your favorite blogs. Want to collect content to share outside of social media platforms? Use Feedly or any other RSS reader to collect all of your favorite blogs in one place, and take some time to read every day. Then you can collect the links, schedule your posts in Buffer, and you’ll never have to visit the actual social media site.
Est. Time Per Day: 10 minutes, most of which is spent reading. The sharing itself takes just minutes.
Hate it or not, social media is where a lot of your customers get their moment-to-moment news. Every day that you aren’t leveraging social media to reach them is another day that you and your business are forgotten. Installing a social media routine with these three easy steps can maximize your impact, without taking too much time out of your already busy schedule. Just 20 minutes a day is all it takes to rock social media.
Alex Boyer is a Community Manager and Content Ninja for Duct Tape Marketing. You can connect with him on Twitter @AlexBoyerKC