The Key to Keeping up with Social Media
It’s probably no surprise to you when we say that social media can be a powerful marketing tool for your business. From showing off your latest and greatest to giving people a peek at your process, platforms like Instagram and Facebook make it easy to share your brand’s story and services.
Or, do they?
As great as these tools might be, they also can become a huge headache to small business owners because of their insatiable need for content. Between running a business, providing a high level of customer service, and trying to stay sane “balancing” your personal and professional life – who has time to create a mountain of content on a daily basis to keep up with the social media machine? So today, we wanted to share our top tips to not only help you keep up with social media but make you feel like you conquered it!
Set Some Goals
Or, let’s be real – set some honest expectations. Because “keeping up” means something different to everyone (and what it means to someone else probably won’t work for you). So, we’ll keep this one short and sweet. When you are setting goals for how active you want/need to be on social media, start small. Commit to sharing consistently over constantly and that alone can help you feel like you’re winning the game (even if you also get to set and change the rules).
Make a Plan
Once you’ve set some realistic goals for yourself, the next step is to make a plan. What days of the week are you goal to share? Can you set up a “content formula” for yourself – which can be as simple as people, thing, people, thing? When you do get around to blogging, where are you going to share that link and what templates can you create to make it as easy as possible? Whatever your plan ends up being, be sure to put it on paper so that you can refer back to it and track your progress.
Organize Your Assets
This is a time-saver that can help you keep up! One of the reasons keeping up with social media can feel like a time suck is because it sends you down the rabbit hole of looking for the best-image-from-your-portfolio-that-is-in-season-on-trend-and-just-really-fucking-pretty. And, if you haven’t made a social media plan to guide you, finding your images on the fly is strike two on the efficiency game. Our advice? Start an account with a social media scheduler like Later (that’s what we use) and every time you get a new wedding gallery or images of your work, go through it, select your favorites, and drop them into the media library of your scheduler. That way, you have quick and easy access to the best of the best from your portfolio without having to dig.
Prioritize Your Scheduling Time
If there is one thing that you can do to start feeling like you are keeping up with social media, it’s blocking 30-60 minutes of your time each week for social media scheduling – and making it a priority. Don’t push it off or schedule a meeting over it. Do it and do it religiously. Things feel like they are a grind when you have to think about it over and over again, and that’s part of the reason that social media stresses people out. They don’t have a plan, they don’t know what image to post next to make their grid look amazing, they don’t know what to say or what hashtags to use. But, if you spend just a little bit of time eliminating your need to think about the entire list every day, that can be a huge relief. Even if you are just planning out your images and copying and pasting in the hashtags and vendors to tag for each one, you’ve just done yourself a big favor!
Ok, feeling like you’re ready to make some changes and start keeping up with social media? Here are a few homework items to kickstart your progress:
Jump into your analytics to find out which days are your highest traffic and make sure you are consistently posting on those days and at peak times
Start a free account with Later (or whatever social media scheduler floats your boat)
Block out 1 hour of your time in the next week to go through your portfolio and download the best of the best
Peruse the Sourced Co. shop for images and graphics to help fill the gaps
Create a note on your phone or a word document somewhere with the hashtags you want to use frequently so you can quickly copy and paste them when you are scheduling posts
