by Adam Torkildson

Social media marketing is highly effective when done right. However, many businesses oversimplify the techniques involved and end up getting poor results. If you want your social media campaigns to be successful, then you must be willing to do the dirty work that involves creating detailed calendars, monitoring reports, tracking metrics, and more. There are also a number of things that you must do to be productive in your endeavors. The top 6 are as follows:

1. Use a Social Media Calendar

To get great results from your social media marketing campaigns, you must have a great plan. This is where a can help.   

Social media calendars allow you to organize your campaigns effectively and ensure that your online activities are on track and properly recorded. Some other great features of these tools include:

• Visualization and organization of your social media content
• Branding consistency across multiple channels
• Easy collaboration (really important if you want a team for social media marketing)
• Stress-free management

2. Choose Your Platforms Wisely

There are various social media platforms that work differently for different businesses. So, you need to identify the ones that are more appropriate for yours so that you can avoid wasting time and focus on the options that are more likely to take your business to the next level.

For instance, if your business is in the fashion industry, then Instagram is the platform that you should focus on the most. This is because here you can share high-quality images of your apparels and accessories to get the word around. You can also find influencers that can flaunt your products on their accounts. Similarly, if yours is a B2B business, then you can benefit from marketing on more formal platforms like LinkedIn. By learning your way around here, you can generate an impressive amount of leads on a regular basis. It’s also a great platform for B2B businesses that want to build a brand identity.

3. Create Realistic and Measurable Goals

Social media marketing is based a lot on data analytics. In fact, you can look into .  These are conversions, search volume, brand presence and engagement, followers/likes, and ROI. These also help you measure your success and growth. So, it’s important that you create marketing goals on the basis of these metrics. For example, your goal for the first week could be getting 50 new followers, and then 100 for the next week, and so on. This way you won’t get distracted from your goals and easily see what’s working and what’s not.

4. Install a Chatbot

New-gen technologies are disrupting the web today. For instance, . This is because a lot of stuff that you have to do on these platforms can be pretty manual, and machine learning programs can simplify these tasks and save you tons of time that you can use for other important tasks that can’t be managed by software.

A highly recommend application that you must use to boost productivity is a chatbot. The chatbots available these days are highly advanced but can be set up within minutes. For instance, you can set up a Facebook chatbot for your business page and it can respond to the messages on its own.

Since a large number of messages that you receive on Facebook are going to be based on the same subjects such as inquiries about your products, prices, business hours, etc. the bot can answer these questions on your behalf. However, if there are questions that are more complex, then you have the option to handle them manually too.

5. Identify Your Influencers

The problem with standard social media marketing practices is that they don’t get the results as quickly as you want. So, even if you are doing all the right things, you may see your followers base grow only slowly. To shake things up, what you can consider is influencer marketing.

Influencers are social media users that have a large number of followers and so the products they promote or advertise can reach wider audiences for your benefit. You just need to find the right influencers that fit your brand profile and offer incentive for them to market your products. If you are new to all this, then you should also read .

6. Recycle Social Posts

It’s not easy to create quality content. Even if it’s just one infographic, you have to spend a lot of time on research and graphics editing. Thus, it would be a shame to use such kind of social post just once. The good news is- you don’t have to! You can reshare your old posts again and again as long as you know which ones are resharable and where do you draw the line.

The thing is, different types of content have different lifespans. For instance, if you create social posts on current affairs, then you can’t use them after a few days. However, if you have written a blog on the history of the Internet, then you can use it in a variety of places. After all, history never changes.

Recycling old social media posts that have done well in the past and are relevant even today is a great way to be more productive. Just make sure you let enough time to pass before you reshare.

So, these were some of the best tips and tricks on how to stay productive in your social media marketing efforts. Use them wisely, and good luck!