It’s complicated to manage social media for your small business.
There are a lot of moving parts to consider as you develop your content strategy and keep it moving.
For many small business owners who don’t know the best ways to streamline their social media marketing, it can be confusing and cost a lot of time.
In some cases, it costs so much time that it isn’t worth the effort for many small businesses to try to manage social media.
Instead, they often relegate it to “unnecessary” or “useless” marketing.
They feel their time could be better spent if they simply spend money on advertising.
But that’s not the case when you learn what you’re doing and how to avoid wasting time as much as possible.
Social media, when used efficiently, can be your best friend without costing you more than a few minutes every day.
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Social Media For Your Small Business Requires Planning
Social media isn’t a format that you can go into blindly and have success.
Every good social media strategy requires a plan before you jump into the work.
If you haven’t got that prepared it’s hard to have any kind of success.
Almost every unplanned social media strategy is a waste of time.
Unless you get lucky and something you post goes viral.
However, you can’t rely on “going viral” as a marketing strategy.
Instead, you need to make sure that every social post helps your brand’s audience and reach grow incrementally, cumulating in massive overall success.
Remember that managing social media for your small business is about earning attention.
Without that attention, you can’t leverage your content to make sales.
Start with a plan to expand how visible your content is if you want your social media strategy to be successful.
There Are Efficient Strategies To Manage Social Media For Your Small Business
Small business owners need efficient ways to manage their social media.
Time isn’t something they’ve got a lot of laying around in excess.
That makes their use of time even more critical, and they can’t afford to waste it on bad social media tactics.
But if there were effective tactics that took less time, that might be something worth looking into.
Learn to make good use of the effort you put into social media. Click To TweetWell, managing social media for your small business can be an effective use of time.
All it takes is a steady schedule and a few “outside-the-box” ideas to make your social media work for you without wasting a ton of time and effort.
To be clear, that doesn’t mean it won’t take time.
However, the time it takes won’t be unmanageable, and it certainly won’t be wasted.
Here’s what you’ve got to do.
Spend Time Social Listening On A Regular Basis
If you’re not aware of what social listening is, you’re going to need to learn quickly.
Thankfully, it’s not incredibly complex.
Social listening is the monitoring of your brand’s social media channels to find mentions of your brand or discussions revolving around topics your brand might benefit from being a part of.
That monitoring is followed by an analysis to discover if there’s a response opportunity that makes sense and how to take advantage of that opportunity.
It’s the first step to managing social media for your small business effectively.
The benefits it provides for your brand are huge, and it can set you up for every other aspect of managing your social media.
Monitoring and analysis like this allow you to act on opportunities, including responding to customer complaints, compliments, and questions.
Customers love it when brands respond, and social listening makes that easy.
Additional benefits include crisis analysis, finding new ways to serve your clients, and earning more clients overall.
Spending a few minutes every day to see what’s being said about your company and industry is a great way to make managing social media for your small business easier.
Learn To Repurpose Content For Your Small Business’ Social Media
Great content takes time to create.
As I’ve already stated, time isn’t something that small business owners have a lot of.
Therefore, the more content you as a small business owner have to create, the harder it is to create enough.
Especially if you’re managing social media for your small business.
When you take the necessary long-form content and add effective social media, you’re looking at an excess of time spent.
If there was a way to reduce that time it would be a huge benefit for small businesses managing their social media.
There is.
If you could get more content from the same work marketing would be easier, wouldn’t it? Click To TweetLearn to repurpose your long-form content for your social channels.
This tactic goes beyond distributing your content and begins transforming it into other formats.
Through one excellent blog article, for example, you could create all of your social media content for a week.
Multiply the number of blog articles you draw from to diversify your social content even further.
Repurposing content is simply the act of taking information from one content format and recreating it in another format.
For example, you might take a section from your blog and record it as a TikTok video.
After that, you can create an image and caption for Instagram.
Completing content for several networks, you could create a long-form Facebook post, a LinkedIn article, a brief tweet for Twitter, and a related pinboard on Pinterest.
From one part of a long-form piece of content, you can easily create 6 additional pieces of content with little-to-no effort.
Your time and effort go much further towards managing social media for your small business.
Use Post Scheduling Platforms To Make Your Small Business’ Social Media Easier
Most social media platforms, except for Twitter, don’t require “in-the-moment” content.
While relevance is necessary, timing isn’t always.
So, to make managing social media easier for your small business, try scheduling posts in advance.
From blogs to podcasts to YouTube content and social media posts, almost every format can be prescheduled.
Using each platform’s inherent scheduling system, you can create posts for your entire week or month in just a short portion of a day.
Spending all the time up-front frees time the rest of your week, allowing you to focus more on the other areas you need to give your time to.
The first step to scheduling in advance is knowing where to schedule.
For Facebook and Instagram, you’ll want to use the Facebook Creator Studio.
Specifically designed for page owners to manage social media posts for their small business Facebook and Instagram pages without the distractions of a social media feed, you can see your post calendar and view insights from the dashboard.
On most podcast platforms, most blog platforms, and YouTube, you can schedule individual posts for the future, allowing you to plan for the week.
Not all platforms can schedule posts in advance, but there are tons of third-party tools out there to help you.
Learning how and when to schedule in advance can save you a ton of time marketing social media for your small business.
Make Sure You To Pay Attention To Analytics
Understanding the data is a huge part of managing social media for your small business.
We’re all aware that some social media content works, and some content doesn’t.
Social networks offer all kinds of analytics to tell us as much.
But for most small business owners, managing social media for their small business doesn’t include spending any time understanding what the analytics say.
And that’s why so many small business owners feel like social media is a waste of time.
When you’re doing something the wrong way and aren’t aware, you start to feel like it’s not working.
Looking at the analytics and learning why each social post gets the response – or lack thereof – that it does will tell you what is and what isn’t working.
Putting the data together over a wide array of posts will tell you how to change your content for better results.
Without knowing what’s working and why it’s working, almost any time you spend on social media is a waste in terms of marketing your business.
It can do damage to your brand and won’t get you any returns.
That’s just not worth it.
However, taking the time to understand what’s working and why allows you to make every minute you spend managing social media for your small business more effective.
Continuing to analyze allows you to continue improving, thus increasing your return every day.
As your social media earns you more leads and clients, you’ll eventually have more time for everything else.
Conversation Takes Precedence Over Creation In Social Media
Many small business owners believe you have to be creative to make social media work.
However, creativity is only a small percent of the actual factors that create success.
It’s the conversations with your audience that can create real and lasting results from your social efforts.
So, as you’re managing social media for your small business, consider the ways you can urge your audience to communicate with you, and pay attention to when you should communicate with them.
Opportunities to create conversations with your audience are abundantly available every time you create a social media post.
Often, it’s as simple as asking a question or suggesting the nature of the response.
Your audience will usually chime in with only a little bit of prompting.
With that in mind, you need to keep yourself available to reply to their comments on your content.
As a practice, you only need to spend a few minutes doing this every time you’re managing social media for your small business.
Most of the time your replies don’t need to be well-thought-out or carefully crafted.
They simply need to be true to your brand and honest.
Several brands have even built a reputation for bringing a bit of attitude to the table.
Do what works best for your brand, but make sure it’s in alignment with your brand values.
Honest conversations with your audience help build good feelings and audience loyalty that will eventually translate into growth.
Take Advantage Of UGC In Your Small Business’ Social Media
If your brand can utilize user-generated content, or UGC, do it.
There is no faster way to create relevant, engaging content for your social networks than by sharing the great content others have created about your brand.
Thankfully, UGC can be encouraged in relatively easy and effective ways.
Contests, recognition, and requests for reviews are all ways to get your audience to create content about your product or service.
From there, it’s simply a matter of sharing those posts to your social media feeds.
Having others make content for you in this way simplifies the work of managing social media for your small business.
And, because it provides a form of social proof, it influences the way the rest of your audience reacts to your brand.
When people who have no vested interest in your company’s success share good things about it, people take it to heart.
Especially when they can see that those kind words aren’t just another advertisement ploy.
If it makes managing social media for your small business easier and it earns better results, it’s worth your time.
Find Content To Curate On Your Small Business’ Social Media
You don’t have to create every piece of content that goes out on your social media feed.
Like you did with UGC, you can find content across the web that makes sense for your brand to share.
Curated content, or content you got about a specific topic from other sources, is a great way to help fill your social media feed with the kind of content your audience cares about.
Correctly done it also offers you a chance to recover some of your creative energy.
Using this tactic as a part of managing social media for your small business is easy to do.
There are blogs, videos, podcasts, and other forms of content that you consume information about your industry from.
As you come across some of that content that your audience would benefit from, share it.
Even if you spend some time every day or week searching for content like that to fill in your content schedule in advance, it only takes minutes to find the content of value.
Plus, there’s potential for an added benefit.
Sharing content from other creators offers the chance for their audience to find your brand.
If what you post is frequently high-quality, those new people will begin to follow your brand as well.
Stick To Raw Content In Your Small Business’ Social Media
If you’re a busy small business owner, scheduling time to manage social media for your small business may not be an option.
Your schedule may be too erratic or full to add another 30-60 minutes per day of activity.
However, there’s still a great way to make sure effective content still makes it to your social networks.
Raw content, or in-the-moment content, can be added to your social feeds at any time.
As you perform your tasks throughout the day, snap a few photos or record some video.
Add it to your scheduled posts with a caption that explains what you were doing.
Skip the editing and the quest for perfection.
Depending on what your business consists of, this may be far more engaging than the more creative, polished content you want to create.
It’s also a lot more convenient and timesaving to do.
Even if you are the kind that can schedule a time for managing social media for your small business, raw content like this can still make its way into your feed.
Content like this is easy to make and people respond to it well in most cases.
Let Your Small Business Participate In Regular Social Media Live Streams
Live streams are a fantastic tool for creating social media content.
Though they require advanced notification for your audience to be their most effective, it’s easy to add in a live stream without interrupting your other work.
When managing social media for your small business, don’t ignore this platform.
Most social networks offer some form of live stream option.
Each has its unique features, and some might work better for your audience than others.
Once you’ve learned which platform makes the most sense for your brand, however, adding them in on a regular interval can have a huge impact on your business.
People love to see what happens behind-the-scenes in businesses.
Even if you think what you do would bore others, some simply want to learn.
By allowing people to see what goes on in an unfiltered way and answering their questions and comments as you go, you can build a loyal connection with them.
Loyal connections always lead to more growth, which is what you’re looking for.
Connect Your Small Business With New People On Social Media
One of the ways social media success tends to be measured is through the number of connections you’ve gotten.
In most cases, it’s more about the number of people who follow you and want to know what you post.
However, in the beginning, that number won’t be high, and you’re going to need another way to make sure your content gets seen.
You’ll need to spend time growing the number of people you follow.
It only takes a few minutes out of the time you spend managing social media for your small business to make a few good connections.
There’s a process that makes sure you’re not perceived as spam, too.
As you do your social listening, you’ll find posts that you can add value to in the comments.
If you notice that more than one of those posts belongs to the same person, be sure to add them as a connection on that platform.
Chances are they’ll either accept or follow back (depending on the nature of the platform), and you’ll have a new follower to see your content.
Continuing to do this while still offering great content will get them to refer friends to you.
Friends that, because of the recommendation, will follow and consume your content as well.
Reaching out to others with value preceding you is a great way to make sure managing social media for your small business is worth your time.
Outsource Managing Your Small Business’ Social Media
In some cases, the best method for managing social media for your small business is to let someone else do it.
Not every small business owner has the time or skill to handle creating great social media content.
There’s nothing wrong with that.
For brands in that situation, bringing in an agency to handle social media management for them is far more cost-effective.
When those who would handle it in-house can dedicate their time to what they’re substantially more talented at doing for their business, the amount they can earn goes up.
And allowing social media experts to manage social media for your small business will always bring in superior results.
While using an agency is often more expensive than the DIY method in out-of-pocket costs, rarely, your net profit won’t improve.
Consider a few key factors before you hire an agency.
- The cost
- Their track record
- What results they can and will promise
- Which metrics they’ll use to gauge success
If an agency can’t promise reasonable results they aren’t worth your investment.
However, don’t be fooled by promises they can’t possibly keep, either.
Remember, a great agency will guarantee growth in exposure and engagement, but they can’t promise sales if they’re only handling your social media.
Social Media For Your Small Business Is Manageable
Social media is a key marketing element for most small businesses.
Because it’s often free exposure and offers excellent results, it’s not something you can afford to ignore.
However, if you don’t know what to do, managing social media for your small business is a waste of time.
Take the ideas I shared and apply them to your social media strategy.
Continually adapt and refine them so you can get the most from your efforts.
And, if all else fails, bring in an agency to help you get it right.
No matter what direction you take, don’t let your brand’s social media go to waste.
