How To Be More Productive On Social Media

Have you calculated how much time you spend daily on social media?

A recent study found that we spend an average of 25% of our waking hours on social media.

If you are using social media for business, are you finding that you are spending a lot of time but not getting the results for your efforts?

Social media productivity is a topic I’m passionate about because it gives me back my time, the most precious resource I have. One of the most popular articles on our blog is The Guide To Social Media Time Management so I know it matters to you too.

You can always make more money but you can never get more time so we have to use what we have wisely.

Fortunately there are some great tools, strategies and tricks to make sure you’re making the most of your investment, whether it’s time, money or both.

I recently came across this brilliant infographic on Neil Patel’s site (great blog, btw) and had to share it here as well.

How To Be More Productive on Social Media

Big shout out to Neil Patel at Quick Sprout for making this amazing infographic. Make sure you check out Neil’s blog for more top notch content.

Courtesy of: Quick Sprout

The Daily Tasks of a Social Media Manager

1. Curating Content

Your audience is hungry for content that solves their challenges will always be greater than your ability to continuously create original content that meets the demand. Content curationis when you share other people’s content and it can be an effective way to keep your audience engaged.

Photo credit: Raphaëlle RIDARCH https://www.flickr.com/photos/raphaelle_ridarch/

2. Crafting Original Content

Your social media strategy can’t solely depend on driving traffic to other people’s sites. You need to create some original content that is high quality and speaks to your audience.

http://topdogsocialmedia.com/how-to-create-evergreen-content/

3. Posting

A key component of a social media manager’s job is to create and manage posting to the various social networks. This involves making sure both the visuals and copy are optimized for the network it’s going out on.

4. Scheduling Posts

Although this sort of goes hand-in-hand with posting, scheduling posts is a necessary and regular task for social media managers. A key part of this job is making sure posts go out at the times your audience is most likely to see them.

5. Responding To Comments & Messages

Once you have content sorted out, it’s time to focus on community engagement. Each day you should be checking incoming messages and comments across each social network and responding to them.

6. Social Listening

Responding to comments and messages is important but being on the look out for unique conversations that are perfect for your brand is where the real gold is.

Social listening involves doing advanced searches or using tools like Mention to keep track of keywords being used that are relevant to your business. This could mean looking for tweets mentioning your business name, product names you carry and also various geo-targeted searches for location-specific listening.

7. Engaging

When you find people that are in your target audience, start engaging with them. This scares a lot of people at first because they don’t know what to talk about but the answer is simple:interact with their content.

Engagement is all about proactive communication while responding to messages and comments is all reactive. You need both for a healthy social media strategy.

8. Helping

You gain credibility as an expert when you become known for helping people on a specific topic over a consistent period of time. The more value you can offer doing this over social media, the better it will be to help you gain a loyal following.

9. Measuring Growth

Are you keeping track of your growth on each social channel? Make a point of checking it a minimum of once a week so you can stay on top of spikes in growth.

Use tools like Facebook Insights for Facebook and one of a bazillion tools for measuring Twitter growth (I use Sprout Social for basic reports).

10. Analyzing

You need to know what you’re doing right and what you’re doing wrong before you know how to adjust your plan. Review your growth and deduce what factors contributed to high growth periods so you can create a process that allows you to duplicate those results.

11. Planning

Based on your analysis, what changes will you make to your plan? Figure out how you are going to realign the path towards success and start taking action to get there.

12. Experiment

Don’t be afraid to try something new and exciting. Try creating an infographic or stream on Periscope – whatever it is, take some risks with your strategy to keep things fresh.

3 Steps To Follow When You Have No Time For Social Media

This isn’t a strategy on its own but the bare essentials for those days when you simply can’t go the full nine yards.

Step 1: Re-Share Your Most Popular Content

Use tools like Buffer Analytics to get a snapshot of your most popular content and re-share it when you’re short on time. This is a good idea even if you aren’t short on time, especially on Twitter where it can get so noisy.

Step 2: Visit Your Most Trusted Content Sources

You might not have time to finish an entire blog post but you do have time to find some great posts written by others to share with your audience. Go to the sources you can always rely on for top-notch work to simplify your vetting process.

Step 3: Respond To & Engage With Notifications

Just like emails, it can get daunting to tackle your social media notifications when they pile up. Do yourself a favor and address them daily so you don’t miss the best opportunities when they come knocking on your door.

How Do You Stay Productive On Social Media?

Social media productivity is a skill we could all afford to sharpen a little. With all the cat videos out there, we’ve got to keep our eye on the ball.

I want to know your best social media productivity secret. Is it a special IFTTT recipe? A special browser plugin? Let me know in the comments below.

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