Socially exhausted? How to streamline your social media activity
Keeping up with social media is a real challenge for many businesses, here we look at a strategic framework and tactical tips to streamline your social media activity.
BRANDING BEFORE BREAKFAST EP 20 – Socially exhausted? How to streamline your social media activity
Today I’m wondering how many of you are feeling socially exhausted. And I’m not talking about too many nights drinking champagne. Although that would be nice. I’m talking about social media. So many of the businesses that we talk to find it a real challenge to keep up with their social media. So I just thought I’d give you a few tips today on how you can maybe streamline things and make it a bit more manageable for your business.
The first thing is thinking about the channels that you’re using. So if you’re spreading yourself too thin, it’s never going to work. You’re better off picking a couple of channels and doing things really well. The second thing is you need to have a content strategy. There is no point doing social media if you’re just doing ad hoc posts depending on what pops into your head. You need an underlying framework that you’re using to create the content. So when we’re creating a content strategy, we create a one page summary that contains all the essential information that you need when you’re creating your content. So the first thing is the objective or the purpose. What are we actually creating this content for and how is it going to contribute to the business?
The second is defining the audience and you want to be really narrow in doing this because it’s much better when you’re creating content. If you’re almost thinking of that one person, that’s your ideal customer, and talking to them. Then you want to define what their motivations or their goals are. So what are they? What are they wanting to get out of engaging with your content online? After that you can include the frequency. So how often are you going to be posting? So that there’s a structure around that. And then the final and most important piece is the content pillars. So mostly businesses have three to five pillars and they’re sort of buckets of the different types of content that you’re going to be creating. And what we do, is we create those pillars with percentages. So it might be that you’re only going to talk say 20% about your products, but then you want to make sure that the other 80% is adding value to your customers in other ways. Now, you’re probably feeling a bit more exhausted. You’re thinking great, now I’ve got homework to do. The good thing is though, once you’ve got this framework then you can create your content in batches. And this is an absolute game changer. Means you can sit down, you can write a month’s worth of content and then you can schedule it using a tool like HootSuite or there’s many others if you want to look into them, that can post to multiple channels from the one platform so you can schedule your months content. And then you can just relax, it’s done. Then all you need to do is if you’re out and about and you want to do an ad hoc post, of course you can do it. And don’t forget you need to be liking, commenting and engaging with your audience. But the rest of it is taken care of. How great! That’s it from me. It’s time for brekkie.
Written by: Jodie de Vries
Published: July 25, 2019