‍

Social media never sleeps.

Hold up, that sounds like the intro to a horror movie…

What about, the social media bar is open all hours? Ok, we can make it sound less sinister, but the sentiment stays the same – the social media ecosystem is always buzzing. And that’s been a big change (understatement of the century!) for marketers and brands to grow accustomed to over the last few years.

Naturally, social media management can be a tough task. Teams need to be monitoring a variety of different channels all at once, posting engaging content and interacting with customers and addressing their concerns…on all of them.

It’s tiring even thinking about it!

And this means that brands are spending an increasing amount of time in a few different places – diverting resources and effort away from other areas of brand development that are equally important.

So, how can you brand reduce the time spent on social sharing, so you can work on other key areas of your business?

Don’t be on Every Channel

It can be tempting to throw your brand onto every social channel and try your hand at high engagement rates all over the place. But, put your thinking cap on and get strategic.

It’s much better to have an excellent social strategy that works with a couple of channels, instead of spreading yourself far and wide across dozens of different social channels where you’re not gaining much traction.

You’ll find it pretty much impossible to maintain the same level of consistency and activity across tens of channels – and each requires its own specific research, segmentation and content.

Think about your audiences, where they hang out online and go where your people are. This will help to free up much more time and effort to concentrate on a couple of really mutually beneficial channels.

Create a Social Calendar

Using a calendar to organize your social posts and activity will help you and your team to stay on track. If everyone is aware of what needs to be posted and when, you can all keep on the same page – as well as assigning members of your team to monitor your accounts and interact with customers.

You can link in seasonal trends, themes and topics for specific periods and it’ll be easier for you to follow and create content around.
It’s also possible to coordinate your social media output with the rest of your marketing activity, so you can have a more cohesive approach and holistic strategy.

Everyone’s accountable; you can identify goals, toggle across each team members’ activity and allocate specific roles.

Schedule Everything

There are so many plates to juggle in your business, so make your life easier by scheduling most of your social media activity – obviously you can still post spontaneously and react to trending topics too.

You don’t have to do everything in real time or post relentlessly and hope something sticks, so take advantage of schedulers. You can thank us later!

An Automatic Social Post Generators enables you to create dozens of pre-hashtagged and pre-shortlinked social media posts from blog posts, press releases and any written content in seconds.

Phew, I feel less stressed already.

Using a Bulk Scheduler, you can schedule multiple social media posts and choose the frequency so they’ll post in daily, weekly or monthly intervals. Fancy, huh?

And when you’ve produced a piece of content, you can also use a Multi-Channel Publisher, which will then publish your content across your channels, say Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram for example.

If you’re managing social media accounts for multiple clients then a Multi-Dashboard Publisher can ensure easy content-sharing across separate brand dashboards you’ve created and can toggle between with Multi-Dashboard Access.

Build a Library

Now we’re talking about a content library, but we fully endorse building an actual, physical library too cos books are awesome. Anyway, where were we? Popping all of your content in one place using a content library helps you to store and organize everything you create. This makes it much easier to repurpose, reuse and keep track of everything.

Then you can use the search function to see what you’ve worked on and the status of your content too – has it been published on social channels, or still in drafts? A File Manager enables you to keep all your marketing files in one place too.

Links Manager makes it simple to reuse and share links and short links with your team for use on your social channels. You can search and find out which links you’ve used for certain social campaigns.

Try Lately

Fancy trying out all the features we’ve mentioned and boost your business with loads more social management magic tricks?

Here at Lately, we’ve got you covered and our smart dashboard will save your brand hours, leaving you with more time to concentrate on the rest of your business. We reckon you can save 8 hours per week and 50% on budget. Not too shabby!

Embrace your inner superhero and control scheduling, publishing, tasks, analytics and more across all of your channels.

Put everything in one place and enable easy collaboration between your marketing team, contractors, clients…and anyone else you can think of.

Try a Consistency Scan today to see how Lately can help you and start your free trial.