There are few inventions of late that consume more of our collective time than social media. Sure, one can argue that sharing via social media allows you to “connect” to hundreds, if not thousands more than you could using traditional, 20th-century means. (Fun fact: the average user spends 50 minutes a day on Facebook alone. And “alone” has a double meaning here.) But for the individual or company that uses social media as an advertising medium, what is needed is some time efficiency. For that reason, you should be using the following three tools.
A Social Media Scheduler
No sane person wants to be tied to their phone or computer every time they post on social media. And then if you want to post something similar on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook? There goes 20 minutes.
Social media schedulers do exactly what you’d think they do—schedule for you—but even more. Yes; you can post once and have the scheduler do the work to post to every account you choose. But if that’s where you stop using the tool, you are missing out on some of the best features.
Post a variety, repeatedly, for optimal viewing
The current estimates are that less than 2% of your audience will see any single tweet that you send, and the average tweet has a mere 18-minute lifespan. Now that Twitter has banned sending the same tweet twice, your good intentions will rarely be seen by those you hope. A good social media scheduler helps you vary your Twitter posts so that you can send *almost* the same tweet numerous times in order to boost your visibility. Less work; more visibility. That’s a good tool.
The same theory applies to Facebook. You want others to see what you posted, and if they log in and their feed has buried your only post, you’ve lost your opportunity. Use a scheduler to repurpose old blogs or re-send recent ones.
Post at optimal times
There are a number of tools that analyze when it is best to post your content for your particular audience. (See the next section.) Your social media scheduler is where you make the magic happen. So you know that (or maybe want to test a theory that) a post on Tuesday morning is more effective than one on Monday morning? Use your scheduler to schedule some of your best content for that optimal time.
Or say you find out that longer posts do better at 5:30 or 6pm, since people are commuting and often turn to social media as a release from work. With a scheduler, you can post your more engaging/longer posts for the optimal time for the audience.
An Audience Analytics Tool
Now that you know you can schedule your social media posts, you need to figure out when you want to schedule them. You could try various times and see which posts garner the most attention. Or you could use an analytics tool to analyze the optimal time for your specific audience. Let’s explore the latter.
Nearly every social medium offers some sort of built-in analytics. Unfortunately, not all of them are user-friendly. For Twitter, UnionMetrics offers a user-friendly, free service that analyzes your posts and sends weekly status updates. You will instantly know your top-performing tweet over the last week, and how many followers you have gained or lost. Of course, there is a paid version that does more.
A Google Alert
So you are an expert in your field, right? Then you presumably know everything that’s happening today that is relevant.
OR NOT. No one can keep up these days. Rather, #InformationOverload better describes our every day, and one of the things this blog seeks to overcome is the overload of information.
That’s where a Google Alert falls in. What you should do, regardless of where you fall on the expert scale, is sign up for Google Alerts (for free). There, you can use any number of keywords that relate to your subject of passion, and tell Google to alert you daily/weekly/whenever to summaries of *every piece of news, blogs, or videos* that relate to your key words.
Let me just say #InformationOverload again. That’s what you will get. But soon enough, you will also learn how to breeze through it, and potentially save hours of time that you would have otherwise consumed reading through entire publications. This tool, if you learn how to use it, gives you your precious time back by summarizing the world’s latest news on the exact subjects you want.
Nonetheless, if you want to stay on top of your game, you should be watching the game. That’s why even though Google Alerts might be painful at first, you need. it. It gives you the opportunity to condense what you read and learn—globally—with respect to your industry. Face it; you can’t keep up with what the entire world is creating. Let Google give you the highlights.
These highlights are more valuable than most people realize. There are two things you are getting from a Google Alerts feed: 1) a synopsis, with clickable links, that tells you what just hit the news; and 2) timely suggestions for what to tweet about, what to blog about, and what news might warrant a comment.
These three tools can save you time and money. Incorporate them into your daily routine.
—Chris Haigh