Success with content on social media can be simple if you’re organized and focus on efficiency. Of course, you know that you need to cater content directly to your audience’s needs or challenges and that you need to provide a variety of content to keep your audience engaged. But how can you create efficiency in an increasingly frenetic digital space?
In this blog, I’ll describe seven simple actions that each takes no more than 15 minutes to complete to keep your social posts engaging throughout the year. Follow them, and soon you’ll build a full-blown social media content calendar to drive traffic and growth.
Activity #1: Set up and maintain a calendar
Why?
We all know that consistent posting is key. By specifying the publication times, you eliminate the need to decide on the posting frequency manually each time. What’s more, you optimize the amount of information you’ll share each day, ensuring you’ll never overload the audience with updates.
How does it work?
To set up a posting plan, you first need to analyze when your audience hangs out online most often. Based on this information, you should choose the best times to post your social updates, and set up a posting schedule in your scheduling software.
It also helps if your scheduling tool has content categories to tag the types of content you routinely share to create a robust posting schedule. However, setting up a posting plan is not something that should be done once and forgotten. I always review my posting schedule for the upcoming month to make the necessary adjustments.
Make sure you are mindful of opportunities like holidays and current events to ensure you are staying relevant for your audience.
I also recommend analyzing your posts’ performance to see if you notice any patterns. You may notice that your posts tend to perform best on certain days, so try scheduling your most important updates on those days.
Activity #2: Break your feed’s monotony with curated content
Now that your posting plan is set up, you can start filling those slots with valuable content.
Why?
Not only does curated content break the monotony of your feed, but it also communicates your desire to help the audience and not just self-promote. That’s a critical factor in determining whether they’ll follow your updates at all. The problem? Finding content to share can be time-consuming. Luckily, you can automate much of this process.
How does it work?
Look for scheduling software with content curation features. This means you will be able to add RSS feeds of your favorite blogs and media. Once you add those, it will take you five minutes a day to scroll through the list and select articles that you want to post along with your own content.
Activity #3: Post as you browse the web
Why?
It saves you a whole load of time. Whenever you come across something interesting you’d like to share with your audience, you just click on it to schedule or send it to your posting queue.
How does it work?
Some scheduling tools will allow you to schedule content while browsing the web with their Chrome extensions. As you read new content, share it use a posting extension. Here’s how it works with the Social Media Poster Chrome extension:
Activity #4: Upcycle your evergreen content
Why?
There will always be relevant content that will provide your audience with consistent value. This can be anything from your cornerstone content to an industry influencer list of your own.
How does it work?
There are two solutions here. One, you can automate the process by setting your piece to go live at regular intervals. Most scheduling tools will provide you with this option. It’s also great for advertising your upcoming events, like webinars or any other updates inviting your followers to sign up or avail of time-sensitive information.
Another way to upcycle your old content is by repurposing. This can mean recycling a quote from your old blog post and overlaying it on an image that you can circulate on your social channels, or simply asking a question about that blog post to really keep the topic going.
Activity #5: Draft seasonal posts
Why?
Holidays tend to creep up on us, leaving no time to prepare for full-scale marketing campaigns. Think about all the events and occasions you could have used to promote your business, but you haven’t because it was just too late.
How does it work?
Thankfully, many scheduling tools provide you with the option of creating drafts of the articles and promotions you have in mind and setting a reminder for the time you should come back to them. You can plan ahead and compose your updates for the whole year, or even schedule and draft them right from the calendar.
Activity #6: Use routine automation
Why?
Social media marketing involves more than just scheduling updates. You also need to set up tracking of your content, shorten links to make your posts visually appealing, edit images to fit the size allowances of social networks, etc. So why use automated posting and scheduling if you still have to switch tabs to create a UTM, edit an image or shorten a URL for an easy retweet?
How does it work?
Many scheduling tools offer a variety of time-saving features that can help you automate those routine tasks. The same goes for link shortening. Long URLs can be shortened automatically while creating a new update. And then there’s the matter of engagement. At times, you may want to break the monotony of a typical update with animations or by tweaking whatever image you want to use in it.
Activity #7: Generate new content ideas by reviewing top-performing content
Social media marketing can fuel your content strategy by more than driving traffic. It could also help you discover new topics or audience problems to target, both in your articles and on the social media itself. Okay, but isn’t that something you do while flicking through the news feed anyway?
I’d argue that no, you don’t. When viewing updates from others, you’re typically seeking information for yourself. To find new content ideas, you must look at those articles from the audience’s perspective. Reviewing what content engaged your competitors’ social media audience is a great opportunity to understand the digital landscape in your industry or field.
How? I have two options for you:
- Set up tracking of your competitors’ social media feeds using tools like Rival IQ or BrandWatch and review those regularly, looking for updates and topics with the highest engagement rate.
- Dive deep into your core topic to uncover what specific information customers typically look for online. Tools like Topic Research and BuzzSumo’s Content Analyzer are great for this.
It’s that simple!
With these seven simple actions that each takes no more than 15 minutes to complete, you can create a social media content promotion strategy that’s going to drive traffic and increase engagement, while letting you focus on other aspects of your work first.