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11 Tips To Boost Your Social Media Marketing Productivity

You have to be a special kind of person to be the social media marketing manager for a company, and you need to have a diverse skillset which can be called upon at a moment’s notice to invoke creativity as well as managerial savvy. Your professional toolbox has to include great communication skills as well as strong aptitudes for writing and design. Some other tools you’ll need include strong organizational talent, the ability to stay focused, and a genuine interest in the social aspects of business.

Since you’ll routinely be interacting with almost every department in your company, you’ll also need to be a great negotiator and a multi-tasker par excellence. On top of all that, you’ll have to be capable of creating fresh, meaningful content, of participating in advertising campaigns and activities, and of networking with a vast array of business colleagues.

Not only do you have to be capable of all these, but you need to have a very special talent for integrating them all at just the right times, in order to accomplish both daily and longer-term goals. Here are a few tips you can use to be more productive in your role as social media manager, while also (hopefully) retaining your sanity:

Always Have A Strategy In Mind & A Plan For Executing It 

By asking yourself the following questions, your business strategy should become obvious:

With a clear strategy in mind, you should then be able to plan the steps which will help you to achieve your business objectives through social media usage. For each goal you are trying to achieve, plan out what will be necessary to get you there, so you don’t start wandering aimlessly and reacting to events rather than initiating them yourself.

Documenting everything you’ve planned out will then provide you with the roadmap you need in order to make consistent progress toward success, so less time is wasted, and efficiencies can be gained along the way.

Rely On Content Calendars

Content calendars can be a real time-saver, especially if you plan on publishing to multiple platforms. They can be great organizational tools and can keep you apprised of what your objectives are on each platform. In addition to keeping everything straight, you can use content calendars for batch publishing, so you can save time on having to perform the same action across many different media outlets. Scheduling these batches will gain even more efficiency for you, and free you up for other tasks

Choose Your Social Media Platforms Wisely

Most businesses won’t really benefit by pushing out the same posts and the same content to all the social media platforms, simply to cover all bases. The ones you should be using are those which provide the best business return, and which justify the resources you’re committing to them. As well as choosing only the platforms where their target audience is most active. If you don’t already know which of the social media platforms are most advantageous for you, start using analytics to gauge where your message is being most effective. Then commit more resources to those which offer the best return.

Become A Student Of The Game

Part of the job of being a social media manager calls for you to stay abreast of business trends, technology trends, social media trends – in short, everything going on in the business world. That means you need to be constantly learning, constantly digesting information about what’s happening around you. There are new tools and new techniques emerging every day in business, and if you don’t stay on top of all those developments, you’ll quickly start losing ground to your competitors.

Pay Attention To Global Events

There’s always something going on in the world, and even if it doesn’t seem to affect your corner of the business world, some events abroad can have a major impact on your company’s branding. Obviously, you need to be aware of local developments as well, so the point here is to find a way to quickly and efficiently digest the relevant daily news, to keep yourself well-informed and on top of things, and decide if and how those events impact your social media strategy.

Work On Your Organizational Skills

If you don’t have a natural talent for organization, there are any number of terrific project management tools to provide a framework for you to improve yourself. What could be better than documenting all your ideas in one place, with all relevant information about them, available at the touch of your fingers? This enables you to share content ideas with others in your team to build upon them and helps move ideas along to actual published content.

Develop Useful Processes

This can be especially helpful for sets of actions which you have to repeat, or which involve others and can be documented, so they needn’t be explained every single time they’re needed. A process can be as simple as a checklist, or as complicated as a lengthy Word document, but in any case, it’s a well-defined, repeatable series of steps which doesn’t need to be re-created every time it’s called upon. This way you always know what needs to be done to complete each of your tasks to keep you on point throughout the day.

Consider Outsourcing

If you’ve noticed the routine tasks piling up on your desk, and you don’t seem to be making much headway, it might be time to consider outsourcing some of the material. It’s not good business for a talented individual like yourself to be bogged down with relatively mundane work that could be better handled by freelancers or virtual assistants. There are also agencies which specialize in precisely this kind of work, and you can then be freed up to address the bigger business issues on the agenda.

Consolidate Reporting

Reporting is another of those activities which should not occupy an inordinate amount of your time as a social media manager because you’ve got bigger fish to fry. You are more an analyst of business information than a reporter of it, so spend your time planning and analyzing, rather than reporting. There are lots of reporting tools available which can do the grunt work for you and completely automate the generation and delivery of reports.

Establish Your Own Arsenal Of Tools

There are so many software tools available today which can help you become a more effective and efficient social media manager, that they couldn’t all be listed. Experiment with some of these and build your own arsenal of tools that will help you manage your social media profiles in the most effective manner.

Avoid The Perfectionist Temptation

As a social media manager, you definitely will have to invest a great deal of yourself in the job, but there’s just no reason to take that to the point of becoming a perfectionist. In the first place, that’s a moving target that you’ll never hit, and secondly, you’ll almost always get another chance to nail the message you wanted to deliver on social media. It’s ok to be driven to succeed, but it also makes good sense to spend your time wisely.

The tips above are not meant to be the last word on being productive as a social media manager. But once you start adopting some of these suggestions, you’ll find that there are lots of others which present themselves to you, and you’ll soon be inventing your own productivity tips. There are many ways to accomplish your goals – and that’s where the really creative and really fun part of managing social media becomes apparent.

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