While there was once a time where businesses used to struggle to accommodate for social media, we are now faced with the case of allocating too much time to it.
An IPSOS study has found that, on average, we're spending 3.5 hours on social media a day – that's roughly 16 minutes out of every hour, or approximately a quarter of our total waking time.
With stats such as these, there's almost no denying that we've become slaves to social media, without us even realising and being party to that decision.
With only so many hours in the day to get tasks done and a myriad of social channels to manage and monitor, we can't afford to keep such inefficiencies.
Here's how you can reverse the trend, and streamline your social media efforts:
Ask yourself, "What are you trying to achieve by going social?" Before anything else, examine your overarching goals of being on social media. Are you trying to gain followers, build relationships or gather information? Are you using it to establish your own thought leadership, or to help you create an online identity for your business? Are you just doing it because everyone else is? Whatever the reason, make sure you pause for thought and pinpoint exactly why you're on social media.
Analyse your existing social media practices. Are you randomly publishing posts whenever you get a spare chance, or are you encouraging meaningful engagement with your audience? Are you on every single social networking platform known to man, or have you chosen a select few to focus on? Benchmarking your current practices will help you eliminate activities that just don't work or contribute to your overarching goal.
Prioritise. "Fish where the fish are". Some businesses feel that they need to have active assets on every social media platform. This couldn't be further from the truth. Tap into your social media accounts, think about what you're using them for, and determine which platforms are doing the most for your business and are most likely to reach your target audience. Prioritising the social media platforms that best fit your need and audience will increase your chances of success, while cutting down the time you spend working for it.
Delegate responsibility. Delegating social media duties to a member of the team and allowing them to be responsible for sourcing existing materials, responding to emails or brainstorming and drafting posts can be an effective way to tick off your responsibilities. While feasibility depends on how busy your schedules are, breaking up responsibilities between different people by giving them a specific task or site to manage, can also help maximise productivity.
Work in blocks. If you spread yourself too thin and keep switching between tasks, you tend to lose focus. However, when you know you only have one main task to complete in a larger batch, you are able to shut out all other distractions and concentrate your efforts on completing that task. This approach can be adapted to your social media efforts. Use your time more effectively by scheduling a few hours per week where you can sit down and do all your social media-related work uninterrupted.
Plan and prepare a content calendar, and stick to it. Content calendars are simple tools to help you organise what you want to post, where you want to post it, and when. Spending some time planning and preparing content (which isn't time-sensitive) to post at a later date can help you organise your content in an efficient manner. While you can't predict the posts you'll need in six months' time, preparing content that is not time-sensitive allows you to build a reservoir of social media posts that you can draw on as you need. The more details you include in your content calendar and the more content you have prepared, the less time you'll need to spend trying to figure out what to post later in the month.
Invest in content curation tools to streamline information gathering. One of the most time-consuming tasks on social media is to source existing posts, either to republish or to use as inspiration and guidance for your own content. RSS feeders such as Nuzzel, Dig Deeper and Feedly are extremely helpful for gathering blog content, infographics, stories and articles from various sites, saving you time from having to scroll through them individually.
Use dashboard tools to schedule your posts in advance. Logging into each social networking platform and posting updates one at a time is a huge inefficiency. Instead, utilise tools like Buffer, Hootsuite, Social Sprout and Tweetdeck to knock out your posting responsibilities by scheduling your posts in advance. These tools are especially effective as they allow you to schedule multiple posts across multiple platforms, enabling you to strategically publish items in time with media releases, campaigns and/or promotions. While this doesn't give you the excuse to be lazy and abandon your social media responsibilities altogether (you still need to monitor and post timely messages), scheduling does take the bulk of the work off your shoulders.
Set up a response system. Set aside 15 to 20 minutes a week to respond to your social networking emails and posts. Depending on the level of interaction you're having with your followers or with the people that you're following, you don't need to email back or talk to every single person who either retweets, responds or thanks you for doing something. The easiest way to stay connected, but not overwhelmed, is to respond only to conversations where someone specifically asks you something – such as the case when you are asked for further information or for guidance.
The last tip, yet perhaps one of the most important to remember, is to work smarter, not harder. While social media is a very important and useful tool for us all work-wise, you shouldn't let it exhaust you or rule your life. Instead, make it work for you.
For more on social media, check out the Fifty Acres' webinar on 'How to be super-efficient and maximise your time on social media'
About Jo Scard - Fifty Acres: The Communications Agency
With over 20 years' experience in communications, political advisory roles and journalism, Jo Scard is one of Australia's foremost strategic advisers to corporates, Not-For-Profits and government. Jo is a respected former journalist in the UK and Australia working with ITV, Associated Press, Seven Network, SBS, ABC and Fairfax. A trained lawyer she is on the Boards of the Australian Women Chamber of Commerce & Industry and All Together Now. Jo is an Ambassador for the global entrepreneur magazine Renegade Collective and a member of the Registered Consultancies Group of the Public Relations Institute of Australia. Jo has spent over a decade advising corporates and Not-For-Profits at CEO and board level across strategic communications, government relations and public relations and co-authored the best-selling book The Working Mother's Survival Guide with Seven's Melissa Doyle.
