5 Fast Tips to Smarter Social Media Marketing

5 Fast Tips to Smarter Social Media Marketing

You know that social media can be an effective marketing tool, but you feel like it takes more time than you’ve got to dedicate to it to see results. On the contrary; you can get a lot done with social in as little as an hour a week. Here’s how.

1. Be Deliberate with Your Time

When you sit down to promote your business through social media, resist the urge to get pulled into watching funny prank videos or playing Candy Crush. You’re there for one purpose: to help market your business. So save the other stuff for later.

Typically, you will want to find new people to connect with on social, review what other people are sharing (and possibly share it as well) and post your own updates. If you set these three items as your goals for any time spent on social media, you’ll accomplish more.

2. Use Scheduling Tools

No longer do you have to post social updates in real time. Facebook has a calendar feature built in for business pages so that you can schedule posts to go live in the future, and you can use social media dashboards like Hootsuite to do the same across all social accounts.

So you can log in once a week and schedule the content you want to share, announcements, and other updates all at the same time, and you’ll have content for the entire week.

3. Use the Discover Tool to Follow the Right People

At the top of your Twitter page, you’ll see a tab called Discover. Click it, then click “Who to Follow” to get a targeted list of people who relate in some way to others you follow. This is a fast and efficient way to expand your reach.

You can also follow back people that are following you, but do so carefully. Not everyone’s a great fit for your intended audience, so review bios before clicking the Follow button.

4. Share the Content You’re Reading

As you browse blogs and sites, you likely come across great content that you think your social network would benefit from. There are several ways you can share it:

1. Using the social share buttons embedded within the post (drawback is you can’t     schedule the content; it goes live now)
2. Using the Hootsuite Hootlet add-on (just click it on a page and craft your update)
3. Using the Buffer add-on (just add it to your content queue and it’ll schedule it for you)

5. Diversify Your Updates

Not every update needs to be a content share, or a promotional tweet. Your audience responds best to a mix, so include a little of your personality (“Good morning, Monday. Can we say Coffee Time?”) as well as company news, responses to others’ updates, and content.

As you can see, a little effort can net big results with social media. Don’t be shy! Dive in and see how you can use it to expand your reach.