How To Spend A lot Less Time Managing Your Social Media
by Sam Lee
September 22, 2020
If you’re aren’t tech savvy or familiar with the dealings of social media, you might find it to be a daunting task but you understand it’s essential for your business to know what your target audience is paying attention to and to stay on top of industry topics.
From choosing which platforms to be on to how often you want to publish content, it can be a very time consuming part of your business.
We use a tool called Hootsuite that will alleviate some of the stresses that you deal when it comes to social media management and give you a guide on how to get started.
HootSuite – How to schedule future content and save a lot of time
Hootsuite is a social media dashboard that allows you to publish content to your social media accounts all in one platform.
If you’re a small business owner, Hootsuite has some very useful features even on their free plan to get you started. You’ll be able to link your Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other social media accounts to Hootsuite and up to 3 on the free version.
From Hootsuite you can manage the engagement coming into all of your social media accounts side by side so you can like, share, or reply right on the dashboard.
It’s a great way to stay on top of your social media profiles and stay on track of engagement with each post.
The most useful feature on Hootsuite is their scheduler. It really frees up time for you to create new content instead of worrying about making sure all your content is being published on time and on schedule.
You can set your content to be published days to months and have them organized all in one hub.
A quick guide to get you started
1) Head over to www.Hootsuite.com and create an account. Their free plan offers up to 3 social media accounts to be linked.
2) Once you’ve created an account, it’ll ask you for login access to your social media accounts that you want to have linked. It’s as easy as logging into each account to grant Hootsuite access to your stuff.
3) After setting up your social media accounts, click on the “Streams” tab. “Streams” is where you’ll be able to access your feeds and curate from any selected social media accounts, your mentions, your posts, and even the conversations happening in your industry.
4) “Add Stream” will allow you to have each of your social feeds to be shown on the “Streams” tab and you’ll be able to see feeds from Facebook, Twitter, and more all on the same page.
5) To publish a post to your accounts simply click “New Post”.
6) From here you can select which platforms to publish to, add images, boost your posts, customize, and much more.
7) On the bottom right corner, you’ll see the “Schedule for later” button where you’ll be able to schedule up to 30 posts on the Free version, days to months out. As you can see in the image below, you can see the same article is scheduled to be published on the 12th but on separate social media accounts. You’re able to amplify your content on one central hub.
It doesn’t have to be so overwhelming
Check out their upgraded plans as well, where you’ll be able to link more than 3 social accounts, analyze the engagement of your content, and schedule as many posts as you need.
Feel free to play around with more of the features offered, it’s a really helpful tool for managing your social media and will help you stay organized.
Now that you’re set up, something that took you a couple hours to manage can now be done in a fraction of the time. Manage your HootSuite for about 10-15 minutes a day and you’ll stay on top of your content engagement as well as industry topics.
Cheers!
