41% marketers use social media for about 11 hours or more every week. That is a huge amount of time invested on social media marketing. Even so, only 15% marketers have proved the impact of social media on their business, quantitatively. What is happening with the rest of the marketers?
You may feel like you have invested a lot into social, but you may not have experienced substantial results. It could be that you’re spending most of your time on menial tasks that don’t require your attention. You could organize and streamline those tasks to allow you a greater bandwidth to focus on decision making, strategy and ideas. Here is how you can increase your social marketing efficiency.
1. Streamline your content strategy
Create definite campaigns that are properly structured. Start at the top (with ideas and possible topics) and move towards a defined end (exactly what content will be posted on which day). Turn the confusion that you have into a detailed plan that you can clearly communicate to your team.
You can do this by creating a calendar and providing your teammates access to it. On your calendar,
- plan your content by date and assign each block to specific teammates
- set deadlines and keep track of them
- monitor your teammates’ progress and remind them to catch up when necessary
- leave clean and clear comments to help them complete their tasks according to your plan
It is important to choose a calendar that allows easy edits and real-time update of edits, so your teammates can view the edits to stay in loop of your latest plan. This can prevent all unnecessary confusion, and can keep your plan moving on target.
2. Create an online repository of content
Most of the effort in social media marketing is in creating and finding great social media content to use. The need to come up with something different and in line with current trends each time you create content can be exhausting. Marketers also have so many types of content to choose from – blog posts, ebooks, infographics, and the lot. The content brainstorming phase is forever present and time-consuming.
You could speed-up the process by listing a bunch of ideas to cover your social media content for months or weeks in advance. That way, you don’t have to waste time doing it on a daily basis.
You can store evergreen and reusable content on a content library for you to retrieve on a rainy day. You can also curate content in advance and store all of it in as easy to access place online so you can pull from your created and curated content on a daily basis. Create content categories and store everything that you will need to use in advance to eliminate the need for
3. Embrace automation – posting and social media listening
After your content strategy is sorted, all you have to worry about is posting. If you can schedule posts in advance, across all of your social media accounts, your social media marketing efforts are almost covered.
You can connect your social media accounts to a social media management app, and schedule content as per your content plan and from your content library for the coming days and weeks. Remember to schedule only non-controversial content and content that might no lose relevance by the time it gets posted out on your account.
For instance, if you are posting a news piece, you may want to do it on the same day and not schedule it for the possibility of missing out on updates.
Also, automate social media listening. That way, you wouldn’t have to manually search for important conversations to be a part of, a tool can do it for you.
4. Use data to identify where to invest your time and effort
Consider your manpower and cost for social media marketing. Isolate each social media platform and calculate your ROI for it. Is it giving you a return? If it is, is that return justified for the investment you have made on it?
It is important for you to consider metrics like Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) when making the calculations discussed above, because some social media platforms may not show immediate returns, but may have an impact on the long-term metrics like CLV.
You can prioritize your platforms and select the top few ones to focus on that fall well within your budget. You can consider – conversion rates, engagement rates and visibility when scrutinizing the platforms that you have a presence on. You can allocate more funds and resources to your top platform and decrease investment on the subsequent platforms. Don’t be afraid to ditch the platforms that aren’t doing anything for you.
5. Re-purpose your top performing content
You can transform the content that has created considerable traction for you into multiple formats. Doing this will allow you to penetrate other channels with barely any effort. It will also help you increase your visibility and capture new audiences.
You can re-purpose:
1. A blog post into an info-graphic, podcast and/or SlideShare
2. A series of blog posts into an ebook or video series
3. Your created images into social media posts or stock image uploads
4. Social media posts into a blog post
5. Customer testimonials into social media posts
6. Content collected from contests into social media posts or a blog post
Tools and resources that can help
1. Brand24: social media listening, keyword monitoring and sentiment analysis to sort important conversations from the rest
2. SimplyMeasured: social media analytics across platforms so you can identify your top performing platform
3. DrumUp: content curation to source relevant content, social media scheduling, content library to store content and calendar view of scheduled content
4. Trello: collaborative content management, deadline setting and monitoring progress of content creation
5. Infographic directories: to distribute your infographics and source infographics for you to use
6. Stock image sites: to distribute the images you create and source stock images to make your content creation easy
Featured image via Pexels.com
