Are you looking for productivity hacks that will make an impact?

One of the biggest challenges that a lot of small business owners face when it comes to committing the investment into social media as a marketing tool is the amount of time it requires to do it well.

It’s easy to be completely overwhelmed by the very thought of having to craft clever copy for posts, capture engaging images, create succinct videos and write interesting blog articles.

Even just planning out what messages you are going to communicate, and which social media channel is best for your business seems like an immense chore. 

No wonder a lot of small business owners put their social media marketing into the ‘too hard basket’!

There are some pretty handy hacks, though when it comes to saving time in planning, implementing and measuring your social media marketing efforts.

In fact, there are five hacks that you can walk away with now and start implementing this very instant.

Productivity Hack #1 – Proper Planning Avoids Poor Performance.

Before you commit to any social media marketing, ascertain exactly how this marketing tool will help you achieve your business objectives.

Will it help you to increase awareness within your target audience, can it strengthen and nurture relationships with them? Perhaps you would like to use social media to collect email addresses or to drive sales?

Work out what it is you want your social media marketing can do for you and then how you can engage your target audience with content that will interest them.

This knowledge will help guide your content creation.

Productivity Hack #2 – Collect Your Ideas in One Easy Spot.

I use Trello for this. As I have ideas for future content – I jot the idea and any thoughts that I have around that onto the relevant Trello Board. Within Trello I have a ‘Content Ideas’ card for my own business as well as each of my clients. I can access the Trello App via my phone (perfect for capturing those ideas that come to me while out running) or via my MacBook.

So then when I sit down to bash out some blog articles or videos, rather than waste time trying to remember all those great ideas I had, I’ve got them there ready to reference.

Productivity Hack #3 – Batch Scheduling.

Don’t rely on your busy self to have to remember or even to have the available headspace to post daily or even 2-3 times every week. 

To manage our social workload, we sit down and plan out the majority of our content at the beginning of each month. We then schedule this content directly into Facebook, using the ‘schedule post’ feature or into a scheduling App for LinkedIn / Twitter and Instagram. We use Hootsuite for this. However, there are a bunch of these scheduling tools out there.

Then, as the month progresses, we just top up the content with spontaneous posts when we get a chance.

The best thing about doing it this way is you can reference your social media insights to ascertain when your community are online – and schedule your posts to hit their news feeds at those times.

Productivity Hack #4 – Measure and Optimise. 

Don’t waste your precious time, posting for the sake of posting.

Use the insight tools within your social media channels to see which content is working for you. 

How do you know what’s working? Refer back to your original strategy. How are these social channels contributing to your business? If your social activity is to help raise brand awareness, review the amount of reach each post is getting.

If the activity is to strengthen relationships with your community – review engagement levels. Alternatively, if it is to drive sales or downloads, then measure how much of this has happened as a result of your posting.

If your content is not achieving these objectives – then try something else. 

Plan, capture, schedule and measure. These are four easy-to-implement productivity hacks that you can start introducing to your social media marketing process today.

These productivity hacks will ensure that any time spent on this marketing activity will provide you with a return on your resource investment.