Confession time. I really don’t like doing social media marketing. It’s always at the bottom of my to-do list, and I often do every possible other task first before starting. However, a good chunk of my website traffic comes from social media referrals, so social media marketing really is necessary and helpful for my business.
Thankfully, I know myself, and put strategies in place so that I can maintain a good social media presence for my brand. Do you relate to this feeling at all? Maybe my strategy will work for you too.
Step #1: Plan in advance
If I know I avoid doing something, putting it on the calendar for a future date always helps me, well, actually do it. For example, I know I need to schedule the month’s social media posts. I’ll put it in my to-do list app for, say, this Friday. This way, I don’t have to do the thing I don’t want to do today, but it’s scheduled on the calendar and will get done.
Step #2: Batches are best
My second tip for social media marketing is writing and designing posts way ahead of time in large batches. I usually plan 2 months of social media posts (about 28 posts). There are two huge benefits to doing this:
- I write posts faster, since I can focus on each post type one at a time, making several posts of each type
- I don’t have to plan social media for 2 whole months after I finish. Yay!
Step #3: Schedule it Out
After batching a large amount of posts, I then schedule them all in Hootsuite. I can set each post to publish on a certain date, time, and choose which social platforms to publish to. This is so handy, because I don’t have to log into my social accounts several times a week just to publish new posts. HUGE time saver. When scheduling posts, I make sure I don’t miss any holidays or special events that might need a social post.
What I don’t batch/schedule in advance
I do want to mention the types of social content that I don’t schedule in advance. I post these whenever they are relevant using Hootsuite so that I can publish to each social platform all at once. These include:
- Website launch announcements
- Sharing blog posts
- Sharing relevant links and articles I find
- Miscellaneous brand/company updates that can’t be
- Responses to relevant current events
- Responses to user comments/messages/reviews/questions
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