Ep 37. Summer ‘hacks’ series: saving time with social media

In this third episode in the summer hacks series, I will cover some hacks around making social media content easier for you, whether you work in-house as part of a team or a solopreneur who needs to carve out more time for running your biz.

Do you find social media is taking up a lot of your time? You’re busy writing posts, creating graphics, possibly recording videos, and then you think posting would be quick but somehow you emerge 30 minutes later and think, ‘where did the time go?’

You might also find you’re posting for the sake of it. You’re not being intentional about what you are writing about.

Let’s dive in!

Links mentioned in this episode:

My new learning platform Comms ‘That Works’ (also here: https://commsthatworks.mykajabi.com/

Social media scheduling tools I mentioned in this episode:

SEMrush is an all-in-one digital marketing platform. It’s best known for its SEO and PPC toolkits, but it also has a Social Media toolkit, which includes the Social Media Poster tool.

SocialBee is a powerful social media scheduling platform that goes beyond scheduling and includes features like competitor research.

Sendible is an all-in-one social media management tool designed to help solopreneurs and agencies manage and amplify their brands.

MeetEdgar is a purpose-built social media scheduling and automation tool that makes it easy to publish your content on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn.

Buffer is a software application for web and mobile that lets you schedule content to Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, and Linkedin from one dashboard.

 

Full Transcript (unedited)

In this third episode in the summer hacks series, I will cover some hacks around making social media content easier for you, whether you work in-house as part  of a team or a solopreneur who needs to carve out more time for running your biz.

 

Do you find social media is taking up a lot of your time? You’re busy writing posts, creating graphics, possibly recording videos, and then you think posting would be quick but somehow you emerge 30 minutes later and think, ‘where did the time go?’

 

You might also find you’re posting for the sake of it. You’re not being intentional about what you are writing about.

 

Let’s dive in!

Firstly, there are lot of great tools to help you manage your social media

 

There are some great tools available that will save you time and make things easier. You can schedule your posts in advance so it stops being a daily task and can become a weekly, fortnightly, or monthly one.

I use Buffer. I’ve used others. There are lots of tools such as Sendible, Meet Edgar, SocialBee, SmarterQueue, Semrush. They’re all good ones with excellent scheduling features and have lots more functionality than some of the others.

Some of those I’ve mentioned offer free plans, some don’t. But let’s be honest, for a few hundred dollars or pounds a year, they are going to save you literally hours of your life, which you could be spending doing other things you should be doing, rather than spending all your time on your social media channels.

 

Secondly, you need to follow a plan to reach your goals

It also means you can create a plan offline and then schedule it all in, so you can work for a couple of weeks without thinking about social media. You’ve got your posts running and you just need to keep on top of who’s engaging with your content and also obviously engaging with other people’s content too.

You can then plan and post and tweak for each of your social media channels. You can upload images before choosing a date and time for it to be released.

Some of the tools mentioned allow you to also curate other content and schedule in different ways. Do your research to find ones that would suit you and suit your business.

I also love using Canva and schedule direct from there as well as I’m a Prime member. Again you’re talking a few dollars a month, for a whole lot more of your life to be easy.

Thirdly, you can reshare popular posts

Social media has a short shelf life. Rather than creating more posts, go back two or three months and look at what performed well. Look at what I would call your evergreen content, things that you want to be talking about all the time, and you can reschedule them. Maybe update them with a new image, make them current, but sometimes you can just reschedule them.

Some of the tools I’ve mentioned allow you to do this automatically. With some, like Buffer, you have to go back and do a bit more work and ‘rebuffer’ them as they call it. Have a look at that option and have a little play around with it.

I often go back a few months and reschedule social media posts that are what I would call the ‘bread and butter’ of what I do, my evergreen posts. It does save me a ton of time. There are loads of people that won’t have seen it the first time, and even if they did, it’s a great reminder for them.

I hope you have enjoyed this short episode today. Social media is a great way to stay top of mind and scheduling tools enable you to do that without spending hours on the platforms when you should be doing other things.