Social Media Content Management: How to save time sharing quality content on social media

For most people, it’s somewhat a non-issue to let time pass them by, as there’s still another tomorrow to try.
But for busy business owners and project managers, lost time is tantamount to money lost.

If you are a business no matter the size, it is likely that you devote a good part of your day scheduling content for your brand’s social media profiles along with other sundry tasks you need to do, such as:

• keep up with the constant social media changes
• create social media copy – add different versions if you are on different platforms
• craft a social media graphics to help wow your audience
• find other contents to share and worth sharing
• track whatever key performance indicator you are eyeing out
• research tools to help streamline your process, or move to different tools, including ALL contents you already pre-schedule
• schedule and organize scheduled posts
• find and check relevant people to follow instead of just blindly doing #F4F or #followfriday
• audit your social media profiles
• learn new tricks to make this social media work
• curate content
• monitor online reputation
• respond to customers
• engage with your community
• build your tribe of influencers
• create and monitor ads including split testing
• know these are: look-alike audience and custom audience and it works
• understand the ad report
• launch event
• know what a Facebook ad funnel is

…. and worry if whatever you are doing is REALLY working.

Don’t forget that each has many sub-tasks underneath that you need to do.

Quality content is essential in social media. It is impossible to generate buzz on social media without it. That makes people keep coming to your Facebook page or other social media platforms. And that makes people visit your site. And eventually, that makes them opt-in to download the app or eBook you are offering or attend your online event. All these take time.

Thus, with the multitude of tasks you need to check off your to-do list, how do you save time sharing quality content on social media?

How do you balance all these gazillion tasks and make it home?

Since you cannot afford to squander time, here are some of the tips on….

How to save time sharing quality content on social media:

Develop a content plan

Social media content marketing doesn’t just happen. It takes time and effort to keep your social media functioning in full gear and high-octane to keep relevant. That requires planning.

Developing a tactical plan that’s based on your business intentions would allow you to implement certain efforts without having to compromise the rest of your goals. This would also organize the flow of your messages, which may lead to a better engagement or brand recognition with your target audience.

In our case, planning comes in a tangible form: a content calendar.
Decide early on how much time you want to spend creating social media content.
Some essential elements that must be within your content calendar:

1. ample amount of time to craft relevant graphics or image;
2. time to craft text contents;
3. time to curate content;
4. time to see what content resonates and what type of content is driving results you want;
5. …and so on by putting in there whatever are the essential elements that you need NOW to make your social media presence grow.

For my team, we work off on an annual content calendar for a client with a bird’s-eye-view of what we will share during the year, and we also have a weekly social media calendar targeting specific niches and topics. This keeps us focused on what we wanted to do and who we want to speak with.

If you don’t manage your time well, that doesn’t just affect the quality of the content that you share, but it will also affect the quality of the people following you and the people you are engaging with.

If you want a particular fish, give them the right bait. That requires time to figure out where to get that bait.

Dial down the background white noise

Essentially, what that means is to shut down other distracting elements as you work on the web.

You can get side-tracked on Facebook as family and friends constantly update you on their lives. Instagram seems like a never-ending scroll of gram-worthy breakfasts and travels, while Twitter can be loud enough with its list of trending topics to choose from.

In fact, navigating between multiple tabs and windows is a huge distraction, slowing down people by a fraction of their usual productive time. Anytime we are distracted, we lose our train of thought.

Once we get back our focus, going back on track to what we’re doing takes time. Individually, it may not take away too much, but looking at the bigger picture, multiply these small distractions over several interruptions throughout the day and it quickly adds up.

Here is what science says about that:

…interruptions during either the outlining or writing phase significantly reduced the quality of the essays — by approximately half a point. Additionally, participants who were interrupted in the writing phase produced significantly fewer words than those from the control group.

It takes not only time to finish something, it also affects the quality of work, many mistakes happen here too according above research.
So how do you control the background noise?

1. Keep open tabs to a minimum. Close the ones that are no longer need at the time.
2. Get over with FOMO. You do really do not want to be notified each time your friend breathes anything on social media.
3. Edit all your notification settings NOW. Seriously. Go ahead and start with Facebook, then proceed to Pinterest, Twitter, GooglePlus and so on.

Leverage content curation tool

Social media content curation is an essential component of what we do. It sounds easy but you have to weed out contents that are irrelevant to your content marketing strategy. And again, going through it and reading it  takes time.
How many content is out there, from blogs alone:

6.7MM people publish blogs on blogging websites, and another 12MM write blogs using their social networks.

Then there are also news, events and other forms of content that we need to curate.
It can get overwhelming.

This is where a social media content curation tool will come really handy for you.

Some content curation tools that we use are:

• Feedly serves as an RSS feed to curate content around specific keywords, topics, or any domain. You can easily organize content into boards and flag content to read later, taking out the strain of curating content manually.
• You may also set up a private Twitter list to add anyone who creates and shares similar content, so you will already have a curated selection when you’re ready to share.
• Facebook allows you to curate posts using “collections” to group together contents you have saved.
• Pinterest is also a good content curation tool. You can save some of your favorite contents to a private or public boards.
• Your mac has a way for you to curate by adding content to your reading list.
• Scoop.It is a great content curation tool for discovery as well.

What do you use?

For brands on the hunt for digital contents,  it is important to sift through the right keywords that are relative to your research.

So better to have a list of it ready. This saves you a significant amount of time in your search for content worthy of sharing.

Hashtag Power List

We cannot discuss saving time on social media without mentioning hashtags.
It is amazing when people find you through hashtags. It has been proven to increase brand awareness and social media engagement.

Although creating your own list may be quite tricky and challenging at first, using the right hashtags would properly place your content in the right category online all the time, and would also help you reach the right audience faster.

When you have it, all you need to do is to copy and paste it every time you are posting something on Twitter, Instagram and on other social media platforms you are on.

It will spare you the hassle of doing it from scratch, and / or figuring out what hashtag to use next. Besides that, having a list gives you focus and consistency.

You may also consider creating different hashtag categories like #PROMOS, #BUSINESS, #FUN, and many others so you can attract new followers and diversify your target reach as you input more ways to find your branded content in this vast digital space.

This is one list you can create once and forget. How is that for saving of time on creating content?!

Manage team conversation using ONE tool

Having one tool as a conversation hub for your team keeps everyone under one umbrella and orchestrates tasks in the most efficient way.

There is no such a thing as a perfect tool. Just decide early on what you can live with. It easily monitors each other’s progress, brainstorm current and future efforts, correct potential slip-ups and avoids task duplication.

There are many tools out there that make collaboration easier for people to achieve results in the most efficient way possible.

Tools like the following are helpful can help:

• Asana–This is a great software with integrated features for time tracking, monitoring and reporting social media marketing activities
• Notejoy–It is a simple collaborative app suitable for individual and business use.
• OneNote–A tool for multi-user collaboration, this is the perfect app for creating and writing content that spares you from the burden of saving the edited document every occasionally.
• GoogleKeep–Google never fails to amaze us with brand new platforms that can be used for writing, transcribing, and many others.
• EverNote – Another one of my favorite tools.

The key is to use what best fits your needs.

Use image creation tool

We know social media engagement can also be bolstered by a good and high quality image.

But.

For someone who perhaps does not have copious time to learn Photoshop or Light Room, or even creating ONE image, THAT can that be too much of a time suck.

Thankfully, we have apps for the rescue, so you can save time creating captivating images for social media. To name a few, look at:

• Getstencil
• Canva,
• Studio
• Adobe Spark Post

These are user-friendly tools that you can take advantage of especially if you really don’t have artistic aptitude that others have.

Plus, once you’re done, those apps have a SHARE button so you can conveniently launch your image as soon as possible.

High definition, quality photos are also within reach as stock photo sites like Unsplash and Pexels offer downloadable images totally for free!

So whether you’re a newbie or an experienced social media marketer, resources are already laid down on the table and all you have to do is to plan it, brand it and post it.

And if even with that information you still think you need someone to create social media images for you then, you can take this off plate to someone who has the skill and can do it better so you have more time doing what matters most to your business – getting those sales up instead of worrying about a font size.

Repurpose and Reshare (R & R)

While there’s pressure to churn out original content every day, that doesn’t mean you have to sacrifice quality for quantity. You can repurpose your old content and reshare your followers’ contents and the ones you created.
When you write a valuable thorough blog post, most of the information included is still relevant to this day, waiting to be reshared yet again for more people to read.
If you’re on WordPress, you can use Revive Old Post plugin to automatically tweet to share links of your old posts to all social networks.
If you want tips on how to repurpose your evergreen content, that link has 50+ tips for you.

Harness social media scheduling tool

Now that you’ve got your content down pat, what to do with it?

Share it, of course.

But there’s too much content that you need to evenly space out, and even the time you schedule your posts may affect how high your engagement will be.

Knowing which time is best for you to post is a strategy that could impact how many your post can reach.
According to SproutSocial, engagement consistently peaks during the midday on weekdays.

The most engagements are sent on Facebook during typical lunch breaks on Wednesday and Thursday. Additionally, weekends tend to be poorer times for engagement – especially on Saturday. People are out and about on Saturdays so don’t expect much engagement when your audience is the busiest.

You don’t have to be on social media platforms ALL DAY to share “on time” the contents you created and curated for your followers.

There are tools that can determine the best times to post for you and can schedule posts according to optimal times it suggests. Check out the following tools if you haven’t done it yet:

• HootSuite
• Hubspot
• IFTTT (If This Then That)
• Social Bee
• Content Studio
• SproutSocial
• and Buffer

… make it easy to save time sharing and scheduling valuable posts, add accounts and account managers.
Some tools would let you do recurring posts with a click of a button. Now, THAT is a time saver. That is one tactic we did when a technology company we are managing participated in a social media mention contest.

They won, of course!

It’s a Wrap!

Got any experience or idea of your own on how to save time sharing quality content on social media? Share yours below!