If you want to make an impact with your audience on social media, it takes time. You need to be there every day posting content, interacting, and building your audience. This time drain is one of the major challenges, but there’s an easy way to overcome it – Create a detailed social media strategic plan.
What Is a Social Media Strategy?
A social media strategy is a blueprint or roadmap that tells you the what, when, who, and where of everything you do on social media. It is a summary that links your social media activity to your overall business goals. It explains what you will do when there and how you’ll measure your performance and make improvements as necessary.
Simply creating a profile and posting randomly whenever you feel like it isn’t enough to get results, even if you do it daily. You need a solid plan if you want to use social media to achieve your business goals.
How Your Social Media Strategy Saves You Time
How do you create your social media strategic plan? It starts with some research to gain an understanding of your target market. You then need to create your plan and set goals. While it takes some time to do this crucial planning, it will save you time in the long run.
Your strategy saves you time because it stops you from spinning your wheels. It’s remarkably easy to waste time on sites like Facebook, scrolling endlessly through your feed, liking this, sharing that. But one part of your plan is an organized to-do list so that each day when you get started, you know exactly what you need to do.
Additionally, once you know what you’re going to post you can batch your work. Instead of thinking about social media daily, or even weekly, you schedule the same type of post (like a series of new member welcomes) in one sitting to be dripped out weekly.
More Results for Your Efforts
You’ll also save time because everything you do on social media will have an impact on your bottom line. This is because when you made your plan, you identified social media goals and how you’ll reach them. All your activity on these sites is connected to reaching those goals.
Tips on Saving Time on Social Media
In addition to implementing a strategic plan, here are some other ways you can make the most of your time on social media.
- Create a Schedule. Find out when your audience is most responsive and use this time for posting and interacting. Decide how often you’ll post and create an editorial calendar. You’ll do this as part of creating your plan.
- Start Collecting Ideas. You’ll need a great deal of content, so create an ideas list and add to it whenever you’re struck by inspiration. You can refer to this list when it’s time to write and you won’t get stuck with writer’s block.
- Automate Where You Can. Take advantage of automation tools (example) for tasks that don’t need the personal touch. You can do this with software or a social media dashboard.
- Repurpose Content. Look for evergreen content you can repurpose. Another great content shortcut is to curate content so you don’t need to create it all yourself.
Start Creating Your Social Media Strategy Now
Even if you’re there every day interacting with your audience, put the brakes on now and take some time to create your strategic plan. Your content will resonate even better with your audience and you’ll start building real relationships.
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