Welcome to The Social Smarty Show, your weekly podcast for social media marketing tips, tactics and practical digital marketing advice. Let's get you taking real action to grow your online audience, build connections and your business. I'm your host, Jodine McIntyre. Think of me as your digital marketing coach, cheerleader and wingwoman all rolled into one. Grab some of my social media marketing know how for free at www.socialsmarty.co/freebies. Now before we dive in, make sure you subscribe so you don't miss any future episodes.
Welcome to episode number six of The Social Smarty Show. In this episode, I'll be sharing with you my top tips for saving time with your social media marketing. Now, we all know that social media is a massive time suck. We get on Instagram or Facebook, we might have the intention of creating content, but we start to consume instead. We start consuming content, scrolling, scrolling, scrolling. And we find that we are using our time on social media instead of working in our business or doing other things that we should be doing.
So what I want to do today is give you some tips so that when you're using social media to market your business, you can save some time and then that will give you more time to do other things in your business.
So we'll dive right in with tip number one, which is focusing on just one major platform. So when new platforms roll out or someone might mention that they've set up a TikTok account and they're getting some great results, it's really easy for us to be tempted to jump on the next big thing.
Now, if we put our focus into one platform and we have that as our primary social media platform, we can still have secondary or multiple platforms that we're posting to, but we want to have our focus on one major platform. So many people might focus on Instagram, for example. They're still going to push out content to Facebook, but Instagram is going to be the number one focus. So I want to give you permission today to just focus on one platform. You are going to spread yourself too thin if you try to be everywhere.
Now, we will talk shortly about repurposing content because we can post content to multiple platforms, but first and foremost, we want to pick that number one platform and it needs to be the platform where our potential clients or customers are hanging out. So if you are targeting, say, I don't know, woman over 50 years old, you're probably not going to use TikTok as your primary social media platform. Instead, you might focus on Facebook. So dive into the statistics. You can do a simple Google search and you can get the demographics of who is using which social media platform in your target market. So if you're targeting a particular country or multiple countries, have a look at the data and see who is spending time on which platform.
Now, Tip number two, this is about speeding up your content creation process. So I don't know about you, but I often find the one stumbling block around creating content is actually the visual element, so the photo or the video that's going to go along with the post. I find coming up with ideas really easy, I know what I want to talk about, but that visual aspect can hold me back.
So a simple idea is to create a dumping folder. So I have this sitting on my desktop on my computer, and it's literally called social images or social media images. Now, I've got videos in there as well, so you can name it whatever you like, or you could create a folder on your phone. But what I do is I dump images and videos in there that I think would make good social media content. There's photos of me in there that I can use. There are photos of my work, there's screenshots of testimonials, there's all sorts of things in there. So that when I sit down to create my content, I don't have to start from scratch. I'm not having to create the photo or generate the photo and the video to go along with it. Now, that's not always the case, but it definitely speeds up my content creation process.
That leads me into tip number three. The other thing I would say about creating content is to batch your content. Now, it does seem like a big time commitment to sit down and spend a whole morning or sometimes a whole day creating your content for the month in advance. But this can absolutely speed up your time on social media. And it comes back to that thing I said right at the start of this episode, as we often open up our social media channels with the intention to create, but we end up consuming instead.
So if instead we sit down and we batch our content, which means creating our whole month, or it could be two weeks or a week, whatever you can manage. But ideally your whole month of content, you're literally sitting down, your focus is on content creation. When we try to create content on the fly ad hoc, when we reel like it, we end up consuming instead, and that's what sucks our time. So instead we want to block out some time in our calendar. We want to make that our content creation time.
Now, tip number four: don't be afraid of posting the same content to multiple platforms. So right, tip number one was about focusing on one major platform. But there's no reason why you can't share that content out to other platforms as well. So, for example, I'll create a single post, I'll push it out to Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn. I might do it to my LinkedIn personal profile and my LinkedIn company page. And I'll also share that to my Google business profile as well. So that's effectively five different places if my maths is correct, five different places that that piece of content is being shared.
Now, at the moment, Instagram is my primary social media platform. So when I create the content, I generally have Instagram in mind how it's going to look in the feed, hashtags, all those sorts of things. But then I'll just literally push that content out to those other platforms.
Scheduling software can make this much, much easier when it comes to batching your content. And so what I do is I use a software called Publer. I'll pop the link to that in the show notes, but it's really easy to use. I can literally create that one post, and then I tweak it for each of the platforms. So I might remove my hashtags from my Facebook post. I might limit my hashtags to just five hashtags for LinkedIn. With my Google business post, I change the little call to action to an actual button, and then I push it out to all of those different platforms. So Publer is great. It's what I use.
But I also sometimes use Business Suite. So Business Suite is a meta product. And so it's really good for publishing content to both Facebook and Instagram at the same time. And it obviously lets you schedule that all in advance, so I can sit down, block out some time, and really focus on creating a whole month's worth of content.
Now, tip number five is recycle your content. I promise you, no one will remember what you posted three months ago. So post it again. You can absolutely tweak it if you want. But reposting content that you've used more than three months ago is an absolute time saver.
There's going to be some content that we post on a regular basis, so we might post it every three months. We call this evergreen content. It's the type of content that doesn't die or it doesn't have a lifespan on it. So this could be things about promoting this could be posts about promoting particular services that you offer or encouraging people to sign up to your email community, that sort of thing, that makes sense no matter when you post it.
Another reason why I use Publer is Publer makes it really easy to do this. So the process in Publer would be to create a draft post. And then when we publish it, when we schedule it, we choose not to delete the draft. So we always have that draft sitting there for us to use over and over again. So that's another reason that Publer can speed up your social media content creation. And again, I'll pop the link in the Show Notes to Pabler.
Now, tip number six, don't be afraid to repurpose your content. So we're not talking about recycling, we're talking about repurposing. So this is taking content from elsewhere and using it in your social media content. So I'm talking about things like the copy on your website. So if you have worked with a professional copywriter and they have created words, beautiful words, persuasive words, thoughtful words for your website. Use those in your social media content. Literally copy and paste sentences or phrases and use that in your captions. You might have some real content gold sitting there on your website.
The other place to look is your blogs. So if you have a blog on your website, which I highly recommend you do for SEO, but if you have a blog on your website, there's going to be content there that you can use. You might write regular email newsletters or send emails out to your community. Absolutely repurpose those. Use that same content across your social media. And you might even have some lead magnets or other resources on your website too. All of that is perfect to use in your social media content.
Right, we are up to tip number seven, which is aim for connection rather than perfection. You will never write the perfect social media post. There's always something that we can tweak, whether it's the caption or the video or the image. But what we need to do is think about showing up consistently. So if trying to get something perfect is going to stop you from showing up consistently, we need to move on. And I promise you, some of the posts that don't feel perfect to you generally generate the most engagement and get the greatest reach. So making sure that we're aiming for connections we're sharing, whether it's the real life stuff or maybe things aren't quite perfect, that's where we're going to really generate that connection there.
And my last tip for saving time with your social media marketing is to limit your time you spend on social media outside of creating content. So we might spend time on social media to find ideas, ideas for Instagram, Reels, ideas for TikToks, trending audio, those sorts of things.
We might also spend time engaging. So whether that is responding to the comments and questions on our own posts, or it is going out and finding people who are our ideal clients or customers and engaging with their content like there's lots of reasons that you would use social media for your business that don't involve creating content. So we need to limit that time.
So there's a few different ways that we can do that. So the apps themselves, well, certainly Instagram has a built in feature which allows you to limit your time on the app each day. For me, I use a timer, so I have a timer Cube which sits on my desk. I flip it around to the 15 minutes and then for 15 minutes I get busy, I spend time maybe looking for ideas, or I spend time engaging. I generally separate those two. I don't do them at the same time.
So I might spend 15 minutes engaging and then I might spend 15 minutes once a week coming up with ideas and saving Reels and saving TikToks that I can use to get inspiration for in my own business.
Another way you can do it is using a visual queue. So for example, you might have a jar sitting on your desk with a dozen little white marbles in there. And then every time you get another idea for a Reel, you move one of those marbles over to the other jar. Or maybe it's when you make a comment. So you spend time making twelve comments during the week on other people's posts to bring them back to your content. So whether you use a timer, a visual cue, or their own tools within the app, you need to limit that time because that's where the time suck really happens.
So there we have it, guys. My top eight tips for saving time on your social media marketing.
Let's recap: tip number one is spending your time focusing on one major platform. The others are a bonus, but pick one major platform where you know your target audience is hanging out.
Number two is creating that dumping folder. So having your images, your video content, your inspiration in one folder on your desktop or on your phone.
Number three is batching your content using a social media tool to schedule out that content.
Number four is not being afraid of posting the same content to multiple platforms. Create one post with one platform in mind, but use your software to schedule it out to other platforms as well.
Number five is recycling content. Remember, no one is going to know what you posted three months ago. Social media generally has a 24 to 48 hours lifespan, so make sure that you recycle that content and post it again.
Number six is don't be afraid to repurpose. So copying and pasting from your website, your blogs, your emails, your newsletters, your lead magnets, any resources that you have there.
Tip number seven is aiming for connection rather than perfection. So don't get hung up on making your content perfect because that is just going to take too much time.
And number eight is limiting your consumption time or your engagement time. Use those visual cues, use a timer and don't spend too much time on social media.
Right guys, thanks so much for listening. If you haven't already, I would love for you to hit that subscribe or follow button and if you've learned anything today or you feel like the episode is worth sharing, I would love for you to share it with a friend or you can hit that share to your Instagram stories, particularly if you're listening here on Spotify. Stay social, guys.
