Social Media ProductivityHow often do you wish there was more time in your day?

Social media is fantastic in many ways, but it is a real drain on your time. It’s so easy to get distracted, spend too much time on different channels and not get enough value.

When was the last time you spent a lot of time reading content that is really not going to benefit your business? We’ve all been there.

So it’s really important to consider how we can be more productive in our social media efforts.

Here are 9 tips for improving social media productivity:

1. Use an editorial calendar for your content

An editorial calendar helps you plan out your content and keeps you on your toes.   It definitely saves a ton of time.

When I looked at my editorial calendar this morning, this is what I found:

  • Pitched, 50 posts – These are 50 ideas for new posts.  Because we have a ‘pitched’ status, any time we come across an idea for a good article we drop it into the pitched section.  If you have a place to put pitches like this, then when you sit down to write an article you’re not wasting time thinking of ideas.
  • Assigned, 10 posts – These are posts that we take from ‘pitched’ and assign out to different members of the team.  This is to do some more research before writing.
  • In Progress, 2 posts  – Writing is currently underway on these posts.
  • Draft without images,  2 posts –  When the post is written, we assign it to a graphic designer to come up with an image for the post.  Don’t waste time trying to come up with images if someone with more skill in this area will do it more quickly.
  • Final review, 5 posts – these posts are passed to an editor for final editing.   It’s always useful for someone to review content before publishing.  You shouldn’t waste time editing if you know a professional that can do it.

Having an organized process for blogging will save you a lot of time and let you focus on more important tasks.

2. Focus on the social networks that are working for you

It’s great to use social media channels to build up awareness of your products and services,but are some channels generating you more leads or sales than others?  Are you checking your analytics to see which channels are achieving the best conversions?

But…

Are some channels generating you more leads or sales than others?

Are you checking your analytics to see which channels are achieving the best conversions?

For example, set up a goal within Google Analytics, which is achieved if a visitor lands on a thank you page after buying a product or subscribing to your service.

Google Analytic Goals
You can set up specific goals within Google Analytics and then track these goals.

Now you can start to track where this conversion came from.

Google analytics social conversions
View conversions across each of the platforms

In the example above, the highest conversion rates are achieved through Google+.   If you want to be more productive, it makes sense to spend more time on the channels that are delivering the best results.

There’s a lot of talk about how to measure social media.  Well, this is one of the most important ways!  Are you achieving your goals?

3. Focus on the right content

If you produce content that doesn’t get you results, you’re wasting time and effort.  So think about what kind of content will get you the best results.

a). Content that is optimized for a relevant search term that will drive you relevant, ongoing traffic –  If you write a piece of content that doesn’t rank on Google then it will probably be forgotten about pretty quickly.  There are some posts on this site that get thousands of visitors every month: they were posts that were well worth writing.  So, optimize your content – check out this SEO Checklist to find out where to start.

b). Write content that your competitor set traffic on.  SEMRush is a cool tool that we use on a regular basis.  This will show you the top keyword terms that your competitor gets traffic on.  Why not write some of this content and take your competitor’s traffic?

c). Write content that gets shared like crazy –  There are some types of content that do very well.  For example, infographics are very popular and will typically generate you a lot of shares, links, comments, and attention.  So consider the variety of content, as some will give you more benefit than others.  Read this post on tools for creating your own infographic.

4. Automate what makes sense

Automation is not a bad word in my dictionary, it’s an essential part of social media.  There is so much to do and so many channels that you do have to set up some automation.

You cannot automate the building of relationships – that still requires one-to-one interaction – but there are plenty of tasks you can automate.  For example:

  • Distribution of new blog content to social media channels
  • Content sharing at times when your audience is up and you’re not!
  • Lead nurturing to qualify the leads that come from social media channels
  • Sharing of older content that is good enough to regularly share.

Read this post on social media automation techniques which will help with a range of tools.

5.  Use a dedicated browser and set aside dedicated time

Do you ever find yourself just checking Twitter for 5 minutes and 30 minutes later you’re on a website watching a funny video?  You need to be very focussed on social media and plan out your time so you don’t get distracted.

Two things that work for me are:

a). Using a dedicated browser – You  should consider using one internet browser for all you social media activity and one browser for everything else.  Open up the dedicated browser (with some tabs set to automatically open up certain social channels/tools) and then, when you’re finished, close it down.  This helps to prevent you from getting distracted when you’re not meant to be!

b). Setting a timer – Allocate a specific amount of time and then stop when your time is up.  This is a great way of maintaining focus.  When I’m writing a blog post, I set the timer for 30 minutes.  I don’t get posts finished in 30 minutes but I work in 30 minute slots.  A deadline is always a good incentive to finish.

6. Get to like analytics!

There are too many smart marketers that don’t look at analytics.  Of course you are not one of them!

Analytics can be daunting.  There is so much data made available that it can become hard to digest, and not all of us are ‘figures and numbers’ people.

But analytics are extremely important.  You need to assess on a regular basis what is working and not working.

Typically, with analytics programs, you can build some type of dashboard that will show you the results you want to see and hide any data that is not that relevant to you.  Read this post on setting up social media dashboards and this will help.

Always aim to filter out what’s not important and focus on relevant data.

7. Share out old content!

Yes, I said it.  If it’s old content that’s evergreen, you need to share it out.

Evergreen means it’s still just as valid now as it was 6 months ago.

Does doing this make you more productive?  Yes, it does, because you are getting more value from your older content.

We use Socialooomph, which has a queuing concept.  You add content to a queue and Socialoomph will automatically pick off content from that queue and send it out in the appropriate order.

Get more value from your older posts, share them out again and again!!

8. Use Curation Tools

You need to find the content that is really relevant to you, so wasting time on reading random content is not going to help.  Fortunately, there are some great content curation tools that will help you identify the best content and will help you share the content.  For example:

a). Triberr – You join a ‘tribe’, which consists of people you respect who write content that is relevant to your business.  This means you get lots of good content that you can easily share with your audience.

b). Swayy – This helps you find content you’re interested in based on the topics you select,what the community finds popular or the things that are trending in your circles.

c). Scoopit – Scoopit is a community of people finding and sharing content.  You find great content and add it to appropriate boards.  If you find people there who are good at curating content relevant to your audience, follow them and save yourself a ton of time!

9.  Perform a regular audit

No matter how well you are doing, it’s essential to step back every so often and perform a social media audit.  This will help you assess what’s working, and where you need to add in relevant improvements.

  • Study your performance on Google Analytics, comparing this month to last month
  • Figure out which posts got the most shares and traffic
  • Analyse each of your social media channels to see if engagement, fans and followers are going up or down.

This post on doing a social media audit will help.

Summary

I don’t have to convince you that social media can be a real time drain and, without proper management, we can waste a lot of time and energy and not get a lot of value in return.  So, if you want better social media productivity in your workplace, try the tips above.

What’s next?

The time has come to think about what you are going to do with the content above.  Here are some options!

a). Review your social media activity and allocate some time for assessing how productive you are and how you can improve productivity.  This will be very valuable time to set aside and well worth it.

b). Share your issues, thoughts or ideas about social media productivity below.

c). Share this post to your social network to get them thinking about productivity.

Thanks for reading,

Ian


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