Streamlining your social media activities

5 time-saving tips to make your social media activities more efficient

Social media can be perceived to be time-consuming given its returns and we can all have limited resources to manage our social media platforms.  I hope my 5 tips give you some ideas to make your use of social media more efficient and effective. Please share your approaches in the comments.

1. Define a clear social media strategy

Being active on social media does not require you to activate 20 different accounts across various platforms. If you are just getting started or have not ventured much beyond Facebook and Twitter, venture slowly and give yourself time to develop the best practices on each of your chosen core platforms.

To start, take the time to:

• Focus on 3 or 4 relevant platforms where you know your customers or key influencers are engaging.
• Create a spreadsheet of all the accounts, complete with the usernames and passwords so that the information is easily retrievable for you and any other participating members on your team.
• Integrate social media to your content strategy: It all starts with content, and most specifically the high-quality content you need to create to build traction. Creating a content calendar for your blog is a great way to create blog posts efficiently. It will also help you determine key messages and monthly themes to be used for your social media activities.
• Determine a sharing path: what happens to your content after you publish it on your blog? Will you share it on Facebook and Twitter automatically? Will you share only a link and a photo on Google+? Determining this in advance will save you a lot of time.
• Determine a social media schedule and treat it like business appointments you must keep to.

2. Make your content social

Beyond great quality, a solid social media strategy depends on content that is easy to share. Make your website social by adding a few social plug-ins to your pages, thereby allowing them to share posts with a mere click of a button. Making your site social also means that your web content needs to be visible from mobile devices. Be sensitive to format when creating content. Responsive web design (link) allows your visitors to share your content easily via smart phones or tablets.

3. Organize who you follow and interact with

Create lists on Facebook, Twitter and Google+ circles to make it easier to follow relevant conversations and influencers and to make your messaging as tailored as possible to these different groups. A tool like Hootsuite is great for filtering conversations to show comments by key influencers.

4. Manage notifications tightly

A huge part of social media management that your audiences don’t see is all of the notifications that are sent to your inbox. As you activate more social media accounts, the number of notifications will follow suit, and nothing will disrupt you like a badly selected set of notifications!

Make sure to set up your customized notifications in ways that make sense for you and your schedule. Only use notifications if you are not regularly on a platform, or if you rely on them for reminders.

5. Consolidate your accounts with social media management tools

• Hootsuite allows you to schedule posts or auto-schedule them at times when your community is most active on the most popular platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Google+). Its Hootlet feature allows you to directly share any content you may be reading with your audience. Hootsuite is also great for monitoring what is happening on the various social media platforms.
• Instagram can be used as a management tool for all your photos. Indeed, this tools allows you to upload all photos to FB, Flickr, Twitter, Tumblr, etc.
• Selective Tweet is a great tool to avoid automatic updates on Facebook and Twitter. Many organisations do not create or have the resources to create enough content decide to populate their Twitter feed directly from their Facebook updates, and vice versa.Consequently, they are sharing the same content on all platforms, which can be detrimental to the incentive to follow the organisation on other social media platforms. The Selective Tweet application is the perfect tool to really differentiate the content on your Facebook and Twitter feeds. This tool allows you to pick tweets that you want to share on Facebook by adding the hashtag #fb to your tweets.

Noelle Visani is a Social Media Strategist at Higher Education Marketing in Montreal, where she oversees client strategy on both social media channels and through traditional media relations. You can follow her on Twitter or connect on LinkedIn, and read her blog posts