Are you feeling overwhelmed by social media? There are certainly a lot of social media services out there and each one of them requires a slightly different strategy.
If you’re not careful, social media can take over, leaving you far less time to actually see to the needs of your business. Usually, small business owners throw up their hands and ignore social media as a result. The key is to simplify and get organized.
Strategy #1: Don’t Try to Go to All the Parties
Social media services are often compared to parties. You go, you mingle, you engage, and occasionally you say, “Oh, by the way, I’ve got something great here that might help you – are you interested?”
You can’t be at all parties at all times, however. Inevitably you’ll neglect one. When this happens you’ll forget about at least one of them and lose credibility because people will show up to see that your updates are a month old.
Instead, choose the “parties” that are the best reflections of your business. Don’t try to use more than 2 social media services at a time.
A jewelry store might want to focus on Facebook and Pinterest. A lawyer, however, might get more mileage out of Twitter and LinkedIn.
I personally like Twitter and LinkedIn because I can simply adjust my LinkedIn settings to update LinkedIn whenever I update Twitter. Both get simultaneous posts. Twitter gets me general followers and much more traffic, but LinkedIn offers me a far more formal platform to actually get in touch with clients.
You get bonus points if the two services you choose work together in a similar way.
If you have a staff who can handle your social media and you do want to be everywhere then consider assigning one staffer to two mediums at a time.
Strategy #2: Don’t Link Social Media to your Mobile Phone
You can’t possibly concentrate on your business if you’re leaping to respond every time Twitter makes your smartphone chirp. You should also avoid any desktop social media service which gives you up-to-the-minute activity alerts.
There’s plenty of time to interact with social media if you just sit down and do it while things are quiet. All of the messages will still be there and you won’t feel distracted and overwhelmed.
Strategy #3: Schedule Your Social Media Presence
Free services like HootSuite, Future Tweets, and Later Bro allow you to schedule social media status updates to be posted at a later time. This means you can look like you’re active all week long, even if you’re only paying attention on those quiet Wednesday afternoons.
You will, of course, have to find the service that corresponds to the social media outlets you actually want to use.
Strategy #4: Make Liberal Use of Social Sharing Buttons
If you regularly read things from other sites as a part of your daily business then it’s easy to toss out a quick status update simply by opting to share whatever you read or watch. If it’s relevant to your business and your brand then you waste absolutely no time by hitting the “Tweet,” “Like,” or “Share” button in order to send the information over to your feed.
This is great practice because it makes it so easy to share other people’s content too. That means that you can devote more of your active social media time to actively promoting your business.
This can even be done on your off hours, since it really doesn’t take a lot of time and energy on your part. After all, social media should be simple. It should never be a burden.
Today’s Action Items:
- Decide which social media service you’ll work with (no more than 2 if you’re doing this alone).
- Find a tool that will allow you to schedule your updates ahead of time.
- Share this post to your social media feed. 😉
