How to Manage Your Social Media In Less Than An Hour A Day

Every brand needs to have a strong presence on social media. Daily management ensures that you’re staying relevant and replying to your fans before they forget about you. But it takes a lot of time and unless you’re a big company the chances are you can’t hire a dedicated social media manager to do everything for you.

What so many people don’t realize is that you can manage your brand’s social media affairs in less than an hour a day. This guide is going to show you how to do it. 

How to Spend 5-10 Minutes Finding Content to Share

The first step is finding interesting content that’s going to attract people to your social media feed. You may already have some ideas in your head, but eventually you’re going to have to look elsewhere for inspiration. There are a few tricks you can take advantage of.

Use Google News

Using relevant keywords on Google News is a great way to find excellent stories related to your niche. Take the keywords you use in your content and enter them into Google News. Narrow down your results by changing the filters. The main filter to change is time, so you can get only the results that appeared in the last week, day, or even the last hour.

Put Those Newsletters to Good Use

Sometimes you can get inspiration by looking at the content people have sent you. Scan your email inbox for any newsletters that catch your eye. You don’t necessarily need to copy those ideas, nor should you, but you can always create something similar or build off an initial idea.

Use Third-Party Tools

Third-party tools are ideal for finding unique content based on the parameters you set. One such tool is Feedly. You can get relevant content based on parameters like your favorite publications, your favorite YouTube channels, and any chosen keywords. This is essentially a custom feed creator.

How to Spend 10-15 Minutes Creating Content

Content creation is the most time-consuming aspect of running a social media account. Unique content is what convinces people to visit your feed. You only need to create unique content 20% of the time that promotes your services or products and the rest of the time you can share other pieces of interesting content that is relevant to your niche.  A couple of unique pieces every week will be enough to give you the traffic you want.

So how do you create unique, high quality content that gets your audience to act? -Click To Tweet

Coming Up with Titles

Titles are important for catching the eye in cluttered feeds and fulfilling the SEO guidelines set down by Google. The title is arguably the most important part of your content. Once you’ve been in the business for a while, you already have a good sense of what makes a good title.

For some extra help (or validation) tools like the HubSpot blog title generator will give you a selection of SEO-friendly titles that will get your content noticed in busy social media feeds.

Coming Up with Hashtags

Content needs hashtags if it’s going to get noticed in a social media feed, especially on platforms such as Twitter and Instagram. Every social media platform has different rules on hashtags, but they will always serve a purpose. One tool that can help you to come up with hashtags is Hashtagify. This tool not only tracks the latest trending hashtags, but it connects them to influencers. In a world where influencer marketing is so important this is a critical feature when it comes to creating content. 

How to Spend 5-10 Minutes Creating Photos

Images are so important for getting noticed. Visual marketing has taken over and only video marketing gets more engagement. Break up long walls of text with some well-placed images. The key is that they need to be unique to you. But you don’t need to be a graphic designer to create unique photos.

Which Platforms Should You Use?

PicMonkey and Canva are two browser-based free tools you can use to create simple custom photos in just a few minutes. There are lots of tutorials for how to create photos with PicMonkey and Canva.

The trick with images is you only need two elements. Find a base image which you can use without paying for it. Throw the title of your content over the top of it. That’s the most basic image you can create, and it’s completely unique to you. Of course, you can get fancy and more complex, but if you don’t have the time this is more than enough.

How to Spend 5-10 Minutes Scheduling Out Content

Now that you have your content ready, you must decide when to post and how to post. Forcing yourself to do it manually is part of the reason it takes up so much time managing a social media feed. Thankfully, there are plenty of tools available for scheduling out content.

Which Tools are Useful for Scheduling Content?

There are so many tools available for managing all your social media accounts from one central platform. Sprout Social is one of the most popular options for this. Its message scheduling feature is one of the most innovative because you can schedule out messages based on specific time frames. This is highly useful if you’re looking to hit people in different time zones.

Other tools for scheduling out content include Coschedule and OnlyPult (applies just to Instagram). You may also want to look at HootSuite, which is like Sprout Social.

How Often Should You Repeat Content?

Posting a piece of content only once is not a good way of reaching your target market. Equally, posting the same piece of content twenty times is only going to annoy people. The art of repeating content requires you to hit your target market when they’re most likely to be online.

Generally, you should decrease the frequency as the days go by. Post the same piece of content a few times a day on release day, but then bring it back every few days, while sprinkling your messages with shared content and other unique pieces. 

This is very much something you’ll need to experiment with. There’s no fixed rule. The right frequency differs depending on the market, the brand, and even just the current trends in marketing. 
Keep experimenting and keep tweaking. 

How to Spend 5-15 Minutes Engaging and Analyzing

Your followers want to know that you’re going to reply to their comments if they ask a question or make a statement. Engagement is also good for SEO because the more comments a brand gets, the more likely Google is to elevate that brand in the search results.

Finally, you need to ensure that you’re always experimenting so you can get the most out of your social media efforts. Regular analysis will show you whether you’re moving in the right direction.

How to Engage with Your Target Market

First, you need to increase the chances of your target audience writing to you. A simple question added to each status is the beginning of a conversation. If you’ve posted some interesting content they should combine and lead to some comments.

Another point you need to keep in mind is that engaging with your target market is about more than thanking them for their comments. Start a conversation with them. Follow up your answer with a question. You don’t need to reply to everyone. Look at the top comments and reply to them.

For example, if you use Sprout Social, they have a section that shows you all of your comments and replies, so you can easily respond right from one dashboard instead of having to hop from one social media network to the next.

How Can You Analyze Your Social Media Engagement?

Measuring social media ROI ultimately tells you whether your efforts are leading to an increase in business. The way you analyze your social media results depends entirely on what your goals are. For example, if you simply want to increase traffic to your website you can use Google Analytics to measure this.

If you’re looking for an increase in sales we recommend Kissmetrics. This tool doesn’t just monitor traffic it tracks users and groups of users as they make their way through your website. You can follow people all the way from landing on your website to the point at which they leave your website.

Time is money, but sometimes you may use paid social media campaigns to increase business. The Customer Lifetime Value Calculator will enable you to measure exactly how much each lead is costing you and whether it’s worth your time and money. 

Last Word – Managing Social Media in One Hour or Less

This may seem like a lot to get through in only one hour, but once you have a system in place you’ll be surprised at how much you can get done in such a short time. Most social media tasks can be heavily automated, so your effort will be limited.

Limiting the amount of time you spend on social media management is not just important for saving time. It will encourage you to be more efficient. You know you only have an hour so you’ll spend less time on tasks that aren’t giving you a great return.

How are you going to make sure that your company limits its social media management time while continuing to get great results?

To optimize your social media, read the ultimate social media guide for B2B companies