5 Smart Social Media Hacks for Busy Entrepreneurs

Boost your social media marketing efforts with these time-saving tips.

The social media user base includes more than half of the world’s population, and 71.6% look for brand information on social channels. Yet, social media can be a time suck for entrepreneurs, from curating and crafting content to interacting in real time. A few minutes spent engaging with followers turns into hours. Designing graphics and researching hashtags can easily take an afternoon.

Social media hacks help you reclaim your time. Use these tips to develop a productive routine that streamlines your processes and takes an organized approach to social media management.

Use social media scheduling and content curation tools

Technology, when used purposely, can decrease the time spent on nearly every social media task, including scheduling, content curation, and graphic design. Most tools automate steps or entire processes, meaning fewer clicks and follow-ups. Cloud-based software works across your devices to manage your channels from anywhere with an internet connection.

Here are some technology-based social media hacks:

• Use Canva’s magic resize feature to adjust an image to the correct specifications for each social media platform.
• Stay updated on the latest trends with automatic Google alerts. You’ll get an email when your chosen topics, people, or brands are mentioned online.
• Speed up your content curation process using tools like Feedly, Scoop.it, and Flipboard.
• Unify your social media inboxes to view messages, notifications, and mentions on one platform without logging into each social channel separately.
• Put your Instagram hashtags into the first comment when scheduling your post through Buffer.

Manage real-time interactions wisely

Make the most out of your time online. Don’t just randomly like posts and reshare content. Instead, understand what actions result in higher engagement and conversions. Put these techniques on your list of high-impact activities. Set aside one or more 15-minute blocks of time, pull out your cheat sheet, and accomplish the tasks critical to your goals.

Keep social media cheat sheets and files

Unless you’re blessed with an incredible memory, it can be challenging to recall user names, popular hashtags, or social media holidays. Checklists, calendars, and cheat sheets put this information in the cloud. Simply pull them up to optimize your posts and engagement tactics.

When you’re creating content or have 15 minutes to get online, use these tips to use your time efficiently:

• Social media holidays with appropriate hashtags.
• Industry, brand, and location-based hashtags.
• Categorize social media videos and images by channel.
• Usernames for employees, micro-influencers, and socially active clients.
• Checklist of high-impact actions for real-time social media engagement.

Batch similar social media tasks

Productivity decreases when you switch between activities that use different parts of your brain. In short, your brain works best when focused on one type of task. Yet, social media marketing involves diverse tasks, ranging from creative design to search engine optimization (SEO) research. Use the task-batching method to shave minutes off your process.

Instead of building each social media post one by one, group similar tasks together, such as:

• Create all images and videos at once.
• Curate third-party content in one sitting.
• Write a week or month’s worth of posts.
• Schedule all content for each channel.

Schedule the same content formats monthly

You don’t have to reinvent the wheel with every social media post. Instead, develop templates and recycle content. For instance, you may schedule a few callouts for email newsletter signups and showcase your top-selling product monthly. And instead of getting stuck on what to talk about — stick to your content pillars. Modern Market suggested building content around “relevant topics and themes”: Create posts that fit into personal, educational, engaging, promotional, and passion categories.

Here are examples of recurring content types:

• Select previously published blog content to promote based on its popularity, social media performance, or season.
• Include a customer testimonial or quote from a review with a message thanking the client or saying how you love to hear kind words.
• Showcase at least one product, service, or employee by sharing how it benefits your customer.
• Put a social media poll or survey question related to your brand, the season, or consumer habits

Creating content around these types and categories will help you as you continue generating and scheduling posts.

Writer : Jessica Elliott - Contributor of U.S. Chamber of Commerce