It seems like most of us have a love-hate relationship with social media – we know how terrible it is to constantly be connected to everyone and everything, but for some reason we just can’t quit get enough. In a survey taken by globalwebindex, they found that the average American spends 1.72 hours on social media per day. That’s 627.80 hours per year or 26.15 days, pretty crazy right? While those numbers are based on personal use, I have found that working with social media for businesses can be just as time-consuming. It’s extremely easy to get sucked into reading all the buzz around your company or industry. Since the usage numbers don’t seem like they will be going down anytime soon, we might as well figure out how marketing teams can save time on their social media. Here’s our top 4 suggestions.
Get alerts
Chances are that there is constantly new news being written and reported on every day that either has to do with your company directly, your industry, or topics that effect your business. While you may not need to read every article word for word, it’s good to always have an idea of what is going on. There are many alert systems, like Google Alerts, that will allow you to sign up for daily or on the spot emails that will be sent to you whenever something is put out on the internet about a specific topic. Using Google Alerts will save you countless hours searching the internet every day and may even pick up articles you couldn’t find searching on your own.
Boost customer service experience
Social media has turned into one of the top ways for customers to communicate with companies and give their feedback, whether it’s good or bad. Even though it’s many customer’s favorite way to get in touch, a large amount of companies are still not using social media to create an excellent customer service experience. Taking a few minutes every day to scan social media sites to make sure you don’t have any questions, comments or feedback will not only create a better customer service experience but it will save time through cutting down the amount of phone calls from customers and also help to avoid major issues resulting from not responding right away in the first place.
Store your content
One of the hardest parts of controlling business social media accounts can be coming up with content. It’s not easy to just think of content to talk about or share on the spot. One way to combat this issue is through storing content ideas. Spend a little bit of time at the beginning or end of the week and put together a large chunk of content that you can pull from through the week. You could even store them in a social media application like Hootsuite so they are ready to go at the specific time you scheduled.
Take advice from your analytics
Many of the social media platforms now offer metrics that give feedback on how well a post did based on engagement. While it may not seem that important, these metrics are a great way to make sure your investment in time and money on social media is truly paying off. Pay specific attention to follower and engagement growth so you can tell how effective specific topics, posting times, and target audiences are.
Social media has so many great features to offer businesses, it’s just important to make sure it’s not taking all your time. Figure out what social media tricks work for your company and use them to your advantage as much as you can.
Photo Credit: Flickr User Dineshraj Goomany
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