If you’ve been thinking about adding social media marketing to your marketing mix, chances are you may have observed that it’s time-consuming.
The same goes for small business owners who have already started their social media campaigns –it takes time and can soon translate into a full-time job. One minute, you’re typing a reply to one of your fans, the next thing you know, you’ve been online for 4 hours; and you haven’t even started working on your projects for the day.
Social media overload can become real, very fast. It’s one of the reasons many people avoid doing it. However, with the following tips, you can still run a successful social media campaign without necessarily oversharing or spending way too much time on social networks.
Start With Scheduling Your Campaigns
Social media marketing should be seen as a means to an end, not the end in itself. That means, like every other business process, it should have an allotted time. Schedule your posts, campaigns, updates and outreach.
For instance, you could dedicate 30 minutes to 1 hour every Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday to creating and uploading content –or whatever time frame works for you.
You can also use tools like Hootsuite or Sidekick to schedule your content on specific days. This way, it’ll look like you’re online every day instead of being there one day and missing the next.
Allocate Time for Audience Engagement
Effective social media campaigns often involve two-way interactions. It’s not just enough for you to send out a post and then not reply your audiences. It’s bad form. In fact, social media personalities who do this are considered snobs or inconsistent at best.
What drives engagement on social media platforms is a consistent interaction between the audience and you. Make out time to consistently engage. It could be 30 minutes in the morning, afternoon and evening.
In fact, we have observed that the best time to get results and engagement is within 30-45 minutes of posting your content. So, once you post your content or update, stick around to answer questions, clarify thoughts… and generally engage with your audience.
After that, you can disappear and show up later in the day again. Hope that makes sense.
Use Only the Right Platforms
By this, we mean, take some shortcuts. For instance, instead of trying to build your fan base or tribe from the ground floor up, why not just use someone else’s audience?
It may be time-consuming, but you can identify and locate top social media influencers in your niche, reach out to them, pay them in cash or kind to get the word out about your campaign. Do you think you can do that? We’re guessing yes.
If you don’t have the time to start trolling through tons of Twitter posts, Facebook feeds or LinkedIn posts, how about using platforms like NeoReach’s influencer marketing platform.
Think of it as a social influencer market where brands can connect with established social influencers who are open to talking to their audience about your brand –for a fee of course.
Use Your Resources for the Most Valuable Activities
Here’s the thing: there’s only so much you can do and so many platforms you can be active on. So, start with the most popular and effective platforms –Facebook, Youtube, Pinterest, Twitter and LinkedIn. In fact, we recommend that you start with just two or three.
The good news is that many of these platforms can be interlinked. For instance, if you upload a video to Youtube, you can easily share the link on Facebook and Twitter. The same goes for uploading images to Facebook.
You can easily share the links on Pinterest and Twitter. Find complementary platforms to further syndicate and spread your content, and use them effectively.
[Image via Google Images]
About the author: The writer of this article, Oscar King, is a freelance writer and businessman who has expeienced the ups and downs of social media marketing. He enjoys contirbuting articles and insights into succesffully and smoothly a business. If you would like to learn more about Oscar, you can visit his Google+ profile.
