7 Hacks to Dominate Social Media in 10 Minutes a Day
Social media marketing can take up the entire day if you let it.
It doesn’t take long before you find yourself going down the rabbit hole of reading posts from your favorite brands. Before long, you’re skipping around from page to page and channel to channel.
Two hours go by, and you’ve got nothing to show for it.
Paying attention to your audience takes time, too. Replying to everyone who interacts with your content is tough.
Engaging like a real human isn’t a quick task.
And sometimes, mining through the endless content and interactions on social is the last thing any of us wants to be doing with our time.
But social media is an important tool for growing your company and personal brand.
Not only that, but it’s a great platform to promote your content.
And if you engage and interact with your followers, you can increase your traffic fast.
Instead of wasting time, there are a few tricks and tips to save yourself from the sea of social-media updates.
Here’s how to dominate your social-media strategy in just 10 minutes a day.
1. Prioritize platforms
Currently, there are millions of active social media users all around the world. At last check, 2.789 million, to be exact.
That’s great for you, right?
Not necessarily.
It’s true that you can almost always reach new customers on social media.
However, if you devote yourself and your brand to too many networks, you risk spreading yourself too thin.
It’s nearly impossible to run a business and keep up with every social media channel every single day.
That’s why you need to concentrate your efforts on the most popular social sites:
Focus your time and effort on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn.
And even that might be too much.
Consider your company and brand when deciding which ones to use.
If you aren’t visually-focused, consider sticking to Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
After all, Facebook is still the king of social media despite what some social media influencers say.
Facebook is still the winner if you’re interested in reaching a younger audience base:
But one of my favorite reasons to focus time on Facebook is due to the sheer amount of time people spend on it.
In fact, three-quarters of all Facebook users are on the site daily:
What does this mean for you?
You don’t need to spend every day monitoring LinkedIn or Twitter.
You should schedule content to post on them, but you don’t have to check them as often as Facebook!
Focus on prioritizing your efforts.
If your to-do list is anything like mine, there are plenty of other, possibly more important, things to be done other than spending extra time on every single social platform.
Narrowing down your platforms and targets to the ones that work for your brand can significantly reduce the time you spend on social media every day.
2. Get a full social-media rundown with Hootsuite
What’s at the top of your social media daily checklist?
Typically, it’s to check your accounts every day, right away.
You want to see if you have any new brand mentions, direct messages, or questions to answer.
If you have a lot of platforms to run through, this can be time-consuming.
Ten minutes spent answering questions on one channel doesn’t seem bad. But when you multiply that by a few different networks, you’re looking at closer to an hour.
And all of this is assuming that you’re only checking these once a day! We both know that’s not the case.
Luckily, tools like Hootsuite allow you to manage every social media account from one place.
Instead of wasting time checking each one individually, you can get all your updates from your single Hootsuite account.
If you haven’t already, go ahead and add all your social networks to manage them on Hootsuite:
Now, gone are the days of opening 10 browser tabs to respond to your loyal customers or post quick updates on each platform.
You can quickly monitor things like brand mentions, interactions, or direct messages for all your accounts:
You can manage important details like welcoming new followers and engaging with those who just signed up effectively.
Hootsuite also shows you content that those new followers have just posted, allowing you to interact with their posts and create a good relationship:
And you can assign different messages or questions to teammates who are better-suited to answer them.
The page allows you to set up multiple feeds and columns based on locations or keywords.
For example, if you’re hosting an event, you can set up a stream for keywords based on location to track people who are tTweeting at your event.
Hootsuite offers a ton of options to meet your individual social needs and does it all in one place.
Now you can stop wasting time and start killing your social media strategy.
3. Quick curated updates with Feedly
This often means that you need content that isn’t yours.
Don’t get me wrong —sharing your own content is great.
People are following you for a reason.
But only sharing your own stuff can get a little old. Plus, sharing and curating other content shows that you’re a thought leader.
Many times, you simply won’t have enough stuff to share, either.
For example, half of the biggest brands post at least ten times a day on Twitter. That adds up to 300 posts on Twitter alone!
There’s no way you have that kind of content lying around. So you need to curate other people’s stuff to make sure your content is fresh.
One of my favorite tools to pull in the best, top content is Feedly.
For example, if you’re interested in sharing news from the top marketing sources with your followers, just type a brand or website into the search bar:
Let’s use HubSpot as an example because they post a ton of content. You probably wouldn’t be able to stay on top of everything by manually checking their site.
The biggest publishers and brands will already have a Feedly feed to follow.
Click on the “Follow” button to create a new collection:
Give that collection a simple name so that you can recognize it among any other feeds you create:
Once you create a list, you’ll also get tons of suggestions on other related blogs and websites to follow.
That’s helpful because you don’t have to go round all of these up. Or spend time searching for other top blogs in that space.
Simply add any top-level blogs to your list to get the latest and greatest content right in your inbox:
Once you’ve got the basic steps completed, all you need to do is check your email or your dashboard on Feedly to find updates:
Now, instead of browsing 10 different industry blogs and taking extra time to find an article or two to curate and schedule, you can get the most popular content sent right to you.
It even tells you if articles are trending or catching fire:
This RSS reader does the curation for you.
You can browse through the headlines, then open up the ones that sound great. From there, you can select to schedule the best of the best.
Now that you’ve done a rundown on your social accounts and collected some articles (outside of your own) to share, you can start scheduling them out ahead of time.
4. Batching and scheduling (and rescheduling)
Essentially, it works like this.
You take one day during the week and spend more time scheduling and curating tons of content so that every other day you only need to spend 5-10 minutes checking in.
You can save tons of time by treating high-volume activities, like email, in batches.
It might take you twenty minutes a day to find, schedule, and share content when you only do a few at a time.
But a longer investment of time, once a week or month, can prep out your entire scheduling calendar ahead of time.
That way, you cut down the initial twenty minutes a day to maybe only five. All of the labor-intensive work is already scheduled out in advance.
You don’t have to be one of the many marketers who spends way too much time on social media:
You’ve got reports, KPIs, and meetings.
Wasting six hours a week on social media isn’t a good use of your time.
That’s why batching is one of my favorite tricks to cut down my daily social media work.
On top of batching, I reschedule content.
Even if my blog post is two weeks old, that doesn’t mean it’s irrelevant all of a sudden. It also doesn’t mean that everyone saw it the first time I posted it.
There are over 5,000 Tweets every second.
Most people are going to miss your first Tweet.
There’s simply too much stuff happening. The Tweets fly by too quickly.
Here’s a good outline that I follow when it comes to sharing content to maximize my posting amount in as little time as possible:
Batching and rescheduling will help you produce all your posts in the same timeframe and let you use the older stuff again to reduce the amount of new content you need.
Here’s how to batch and reschedule posts to save your limited time.
5. Schedule everything with Buffer
If you haven’t started using scheduling apps like Buffer for social media, you’re likely spending way too much time every day on social.
Buffer can help with the process of sharing content to help establish yourself as an industry expert.
It easily schedules content on multiple social platforms at once. It also helps you find and then schedule posts at the most active social hours of the day:
Posting at the right times is critical for engagement.
If you post in the “dead zones,” you are asking for your content to get fewer clicks, likes, and shares.
Based on the platforms you use, plug in the most high-traffic times for each site into your Buffer account under the scheduling section:
Once you’ve got your scheduling times down, you can start to schedule your content.
One of the easiest ways to schedule content is by downloading Buffer’s Chrome Extension.
The extension makes it easy to share any of your content directly from the page itself.
Navigate to your newest blog post and click the extension icon. Then, you can share that post directly to every social account you have:
It’s that easy!
You can add that post to your queue, share it now, or schedule it to go live at a specific time.
6. Create lists on Twitter
Do you find yourself getting bogged down in the mess that is Twitter?
I know I do!
It’s a sea of trending topics, moments, mentions, DMs, and late-night Presidential thoughts.
Thankfully, Twitter helps you manage the conversation with lists.
For example, you can create lists around specific topics like “SEO.” Or you can create some around specific members, like “SEO experts.”
That way, you can bypass the entire firehose of a timeline and jump straight into the lists.
You can even monitor lists from your recently-set-up Hootsuite account.
Once you’ve set a few up, you don’t need to keep coming back to Twitter to check the updates.
To get started with Twitter lists, click on your profile picture in the top right corner and select Lists:
Then, create a new list:
Create your lists based on things like marketing news, top influencers, and other subjects relevant to your brand.
I suggest creating multiple lists based on content type so that you can quickly distinguish between the content in each channel.
Now it’s time to add people to this list:
You can add anyone on Twitter, from industry leaders like HubSpot to smaller accounts based on your interests or content similarities.
If you don’t feel like crafting your own list, you can always piggyback on popular accounts.
Do this by going to an account page in your industry and clicking the profile.
Next, click on the “lists” section to see what lists they subscribe to and which they’re a member of:
You can also find great list options and even ideas for creating your own:
Use these Twitter lists to generate curated content and engage with bigger brands fast.
7. Keep track of popular accounts with LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator
It’s no secret that people don’t spend as much time on LinkedIn as they do on Facebook:
In fact, people spend the least amount of time on it. Only 10 minutes each day!
So what does that mean for marketers?
You can cut back your own time, sure. But it means that, if you do spend less time, make it 10x more valuable.
The biggest LinkedIn benefit is the quality of people you’ll find. So you don’t have to worry about keeping up with the content publishing.
Instead, focus on connecting with a few quality people each week.
LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator is the perfect tool to make just 2-3 minutes count.
It helps you bring together updates from all the companies or target accounts you follow to better leverage engagement and interaction.
Here’s what it looks like:
The Sales Navigator provides up-to-date information on each company you follow or target.
You can get their shared updates curated directly to your inbox. You can even get updates on brand mentions in the news.
Take advantage of the many customizable options and ways to get information from the best companies out there.
You can use this information to interact with their newly shared content.
The trick is to get each brand, influencer, or prospect to recognize you by name. That means you’ll have to follow up a few times to build that rapport and recognition initially.
LinkedIn is a lead generator like no other channel.
You don’t have to spend a ton of time there. But you definitely should focus on using the time you spend on LinkedIn more efficiently.
Conclusion
Marketers and social media have a bit of a love-hate relationship.
Millions of people and countless customers are using it every day to find new brands, information, and industry news.
But it can also take up way too much time in your busy schedule.
You can quickly get lost trying to interact with everyone who messages you.
Plus, every platform offers something different. So it will often end up consuming more of your limited time.
The key to dominating social media in 10 minutes every day is to narrow down your platforms and targets to the ones that work best for your brand.
Next, use tools like Hootsuite to manage those platforms in the same application.
Then you can easily curate content with Feedly and share it on Buffer.
It’s possible to limit your daily time on social media to just 10 minutes.
You just need to use the right tools and focus your efforts on the most important aspects of your social media strategy.
What’s your best tip for getting the most leverage out of social media in the least amount of time?
The post 7 Hacks to Dominate Social Media in 10 Minutes a Day appeared first on Neil Patel.
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