Do you struggle to keep up with your social media marketing? It can be a challenge for sure. It seems there is a new hot social network appearing at least every week and it can be hard to keep up and get results.
Here are 11 ways I have found to simplify your social media marketing and get results.
1. Have a clear plan for how you are going to use social media. This includes knowing which networks are the best for your target market, how often you will use each one, general topic ideas for posts, contests you will run, and how you will grow your audience.
2. Create a daily, and weekly schedule. Know which networks you will use daily and which ones weekly. For example, I use twitter, pinterest and facebook daily for at least 10 minutes and sometimes for up to 30 minutes when I have the time. I only use linkedin weekly, although I do schedule updates automatically that post daily. I also only upload videos to youtube once a week, although I usually will create several at once.
3. Have a blogging calender. I’ve experminted in the past with scheduling posts a month or more in advance, and that doesn’t work super well since I find that I forget to effectively promote those posts when I do that, however, I will write several at once and then post them according to my blogging schedule and then promote each post as I publish them. I personally update this blog once a week and my other health and wellness blog two or three times per week.
I also have a list of sites where I promote each post after it is published.
4. Schedule some time once a month to write a large batch of blog posts, and articles, create videos, record audios and other content.
5. Avoid trying to use more than 3 social networks on a daily basis. For most people three is more than enough. You can have profiles on others and use them periodically but three is enough for regular use.
6. Use the Google Reader to follow blogs that you want to read and comment on in order to save time and track all of your blogs.
7. Use worksheets to track what you are doing and your progress. I offer mine for free when you subscribe to my list.
8. Set up Google Alerts for topics that you want to track.
9. Use Social Oomph to automate your direct messages, and following on twitter. You can also get emails from them with keywords that are being used on twitter.
10. Use an automatic updates scheduler such as Hootsuite or the Buffer App to schedule 1-2 updates per day. You don’t want to automate all of your updates though.
11. Use tweetdeck to organize the people you follow on twtiter into lists and to manage those lists for easier, following, tracking and interaction.
What other ideas have you used to simplify your social media marketing?
