5 Most Time Consuming Tasks in Your Social Media Marketing – and How to Speed Them Up

Social media marketing is essential for the success of your business, and the marketing climate is highly competitive. Social media is a representation of the real world – everyone participates, and it’s easy for people to slip into their niches. Attempting to be seen, let alone attempting to achieve outstanding results, is difficult in an oversaturated market. Unless your company is entirely unique, you’re likely to run into that challenge.

This makes social media marketing tasks time-consuming. There are so many factors at play. Since there is no “one and done” solution, even things that seem simple on the surface will ultimately wind up becoming complex projects. By changing your approach to these tasks, you may be able to expedite them without sacrificing the quality of their outcome.

1. Researching Your Audience

The most important part of crafting your message is understanding who that message is for. When you’re trying to stand out to a specific demographic that is undoubtedly also being targeted by your competitors, you need to develop a thorough portrait of that audience in order to be able to effectively compete. Simply setting age, gender, interest, and location parameters within Facebook’s ad feature may not be enough to produce the results you want.

Some companies go the route of taking a deep dive, using focus group data to refine their target audience. There are many ways to approach the same vital task, but one of the most effective doesn’t require a surplus of time and money.

Start by researching your competitors. This information is valuable to you anyway – you cannot compete unless you know who you’re competing against. The comments section on their post is going to be the best representation of the people whose attention you’re vying for. You’ll be able to see the number of responses and “likes” on every post, which will give you a solid foundation to determine the kind of content they’re most likely to interact with.

You may also be able to recognize pain points in a similar fashion. Any complaints they leave or suggestions they make will give you an opportunity to solve problems or innovate ahead of your competitor. Your audience is already asking someone else for what they want. If you can be the first to deliver it, you may be able to poach them from a competitor they’re less than satisfied with.

2. Creating Valuable Posts

People are inundated with content. Giving them content that doesn’t resonate with them, content that doesn’t speak loudly, or content that feels redundant won’t get you very far. If your posts don’t have enough value to your audience, one of two things will happen. They’ll either scroll right by you, or they’ll unfollow you completely.

Creating and abiding by a checklist will allow you to easily create valuable posts every time. This checklist will vary from business to business, as the tone is likely to change depending on the target audience. Ideally, a post will be all of the following:

• 
  Informative (or Useful)
  

• Engaging
  

• Highlighting a Call to Action
  

• Humorous, thought-provoking, or designed to inspire a discussion (bonus points for all three)
  

• Different from your previous posts
  

• Something that distinguishes your brand from your competitor’s brand
  
  

When drafting up posts, simply make sure that every idea meets most of the criteria on the list. If the posts don’t have a clear purpose, you’re missing opportunities to reach your audience.

3. Maximizing the Usefulness of Your Content

Coming up with several new social media posts every day is a chore. After a while, it’s very easy to run out of ideas. You’ll wind up saying the same thing in a million different ways, and you risk being viewed as useless to your audience. Don’t spend hours racking your brain to create new content that merely reiterates all the things you’ve already said before – create content that you can share over and over again.

Evergreen content is one of the most important things in your social media marketing arsenal. Seasonal, trending, and relevant topical content are all very important. When nothing else is going on, you need to keep yourself on everyone’s radar. Evergreen content will help you fill those gaps. Create longer, useful pieces of content (with references to products or services) that you can share every few months or during slower periods. Going the extra mile for a dozen pieces of content that can be easily repurposed is far easier than straining to come up with original content that will have a short lifespan.

4. Turning Posts into Conversions

Turning posts into conversions is the entire point at the end of the day. Many companies feel as though their posts aren’t converting enough of their audience members into customers. The solution is much simpler than most companies believe it to be. Rather than posting great content and hoping that your audience feels intuitively inclined to act upon what they’ve read, make it easy for them. Include a clear call to action in your social media posts.

What do you want them to do? Do you want them to purchase something during a sale? Do you want them to download a free eBook or install your shopping app? Make it as easy as possible. Give them the “what” and the “why” and make the “how” as simple as just a few clicks.

5. Effectively Cross-Posting Your Content

You’re going to have different audiences on every social media platform. Some of your Instagram followers may not even have a Facebook account, and vice versa. That makes cross-posting necessary. You want to be sure that everyone has access to the same information. If you aren’t currently utilizing one, there are plenty of social media aggregation tools that will allow you to manage the entirety of your social media presence from a single interface, making cross posting as simple as clicking a button.

Conclusion

Social media marketing will always take a significant amount of time, but managing your tasks and repurposing your resources will allow you to do much more with much less. Automating posts and considering the long term value of every piece of content you generate can allow you to free up the time and the manpower you need to focus on other crucial areas of your business.

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