Hey, Bosses, it’s Sunny Lenarduzzi and you are in the right place if you’ve ever utter the words, “Ugh, social media takes so much time.” I get it. I totally get it. I’ve been doing this for almost a decade and if you’re doing social media wrong, it’s a huge waste of time and a huge time suck – BUT, with that being said, I’ve got a lot of systems and processes that I have in place to make sure that I’m constantly active on social media, ,building my relationships and engaging with people but I’m not constantly on my phone or in my computer and I’m able to still grow my actual business. I wanted to make this video because I’ve had a lot of requests for it and a lot of people asked how I manage my time with my social media community and also with growing a business. These are my top five social media time savers.
Tip #1 is content. This is probably the biggest time suck of them all when you’re trying to think of new content to post everyday. Right there, if you are still doing that every single morning, you’re waking up and scratching your head and trying to figure out what to post that day, you’re doing it wrong. This is going to save you a lot of time. I have a tutorial on how to set up a content calendar and you can check it out below this video and also in that video, I give you a free template to the content calendar that I use and how to set it up.
Another key to creating content on the go and keeping it quick and efficient is using stock images and another thing that I like to do is to create video content because obviously, video performs very well and you don’t necessarily have to be on camera for it. The first thing is you want to use stock photography to make your own images or graphics. I have a few favorite resources. I have three that I’m going to share with you.
Pexels, Unsplash and Picjumbo are all three websites where you can download stock images that match your brand. It’s a great way to get free pictures and create new kinds of content for social media. Another thing, like I said, creating video content on the go and not having to be on camera, I explained how to make video content without being on camera and another tutorial so I’m going to link to that tutorial below this video as well and you can make videos in a matter of seconds to post to all of your social media accounts.
Tip #2 is lists and notifications. Lists, I mean two things. First is hashtag lists. This is so important to save you so much time. I have a list in my phone just in my Notes of all of the niche hashtags that I want to include on my Instagram posts. They target the right audience and they drive a lot more traffic when I use these hashtags. Look at your competitors in your space or look at other people in your industry, see which hashtags they’re using and which hashtags drive a lot of traffic to your posts. Put them into your lists in your Notes on your phone. Just copy and paste them and add them into your post. You can also add them to things like Twitter posts or Facebook posts as well.
The next list is network lists. On Twitter specifically, I have a bunch of different lists that keep my contacts organized so I can just go to one of those private lists or public lists and engage with people that I want to speak to and also focus on different types of content. I have lists set up for influencers in MySpace, for media in MySpace and journalists. I also have it set up for events that I attend and speakers that I’ve been on stage with. It’s people that I regularly want to engage with and I know are going to be providing content that is relevant to my target audience.
The other thing is notifications like I said, so especially on Instagram. Set up your notifications for people that you want to engage with. The influencers in your space or people that you regularly want to talk to, have notifications setups so that when they post, you’re the first to know and you can actually engage with them because with how algorithm works now, it’s really hard to see everybody’s content on Instagram so notifications are key.
Tip #3 is my secret weapon. Well, not so secret because I talk about it a lot but it’s Hootsuite. I use Hootsuite as my social media platform or dashboard of choice. The reason I love Hootsuite so much, I’ve been using it for almost a decade now which is really weird, I use it because I only spend about 30 minutes a day or maybe even 20 minutes a day going into my search streams that I set up in Hootsuite for things like social media, video marketing, technology and I go and see what the top tweets are in those search streams and that allows me to find content that I want to share throughout my day. I’ll schedule retweets for later in the day. I’ll schedule responses to people for later in the day so I’m constantly active on Twitter. I love Hootsuite for that reason.
Another reason I love Hootsuite is because you can bulk schedule messages. If you want to drive people to a specific blog and it’s evergreen content that’s never going to be out of date, you can schedule that for the next year once or twice a week and you don’t even have to think about it. Scheduling in bulk, scheduling in Hootsuite are huge feature as well. Search streams are great and pretty much for me, it’s just being able to organize everything in one place and have these streams set up where I can readily pull content from in a really quick and efficient manner.
Tip #4 is stop and listen. Yes, pay attention to your audience. Actually, check in with them. I try to do this as often as possible because these are the best clues for what kind of content is going to work and give you the most bang for your buck or the most ROI. You want to make sure that you’re creating content that’s actually going to work for your audience so the best way to figure that out is to ask them. I will do live streams. I will post questions and see what people want me to make videos on and it gives me the best data. Actually, this video is because of a request that I got on social media. Listen to your audience. Check in with them, ask questions and get your content clues from there.
Tip #5 live streaming. I love live streaming. Why? Because there’s no production involve. The best part about live streaming is you just go live. Yes, you need to prep beforehand and make sure you know what you’re talking about and provide value to your audience but the great thing is you don’t need to edit it afterwards and there’s nothing you need to do once you’ve checked out of that live stream. I use it a lot like I said to listen to my audience and engage with them and figure out what they want to hear from me but I also will just do live tutorials if I don’t want to do a produced video on YouTube or don’t have time for it, I’ll just do it on live streaming instead.
Here’s another little bonus tip for you. If you do a half an hour live stream or even a 15-minute live stream, you can send it off to be transcribed or have somebody on your team to transcribe it or go to a site like Fiverr and pay $5 to have someone transcribed it and use whatever it is that you said in that live stream that resonated with people and create graphics out of it, creating a blog post out of it. You could literally just copy and paste the transcription and create a blog out of it. That’s a great way for you to just repurpose your content. Take your live streams and turn them into a bunch of other pieces of content, tweets, blog posts, graphics, whatever it may be and that’s a huge time saver as well.
What are your favorite social media time savers? Leave them in the comment section below. I would love to hear them and I think we would all love to hear them and share them and also make sure that you download that free content calendar template. It will save you so much time. It is below this video as well. If you like this video, hit the like button below. Share it with your friends and be sure to subscribe and I will see you on the next episode of The Sunny Show.
Positive vibes,
-S
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