Top 10 Time Management Tips for Social Media Marketers

As a social media marketer, you know that keeping up with all of the different platforms and their updates can be a daunting task. Not to mention, trying to find time to actually create content or engage with your followers can feel impossible! But don't worry, we're here to help. Below are ten tips for managing your social media marketing so that it doesn't take over your entire schedule.

Block Off Time Specifically For Social Media Tasks

One of the best ways to ensure that you're able to stay on top of your social media marketing is to block off time specifically for those tasks. This will help you to avoid feeling overwhelmed and will allow you to focus on your goals without being interrupted.

To make the most of your time, try scheduling specific blocks of time each day where you'll be working on social media tasks. This could include creating content, engaging with followers, or researching new trends. By dedicating specific times to these activities, you'll be able to better plan and organize your day. And if something else comes up during those times, you'll know that it's more important and can reschedule your social media tasks for later.

Don't Create In A Vacuum

Creativity is a skill that can be learned. Humans are capable of being creative in any field, not just art or design. Creativity is about solving problems and coming up with new ideas. If you want to become more creative, it's important to have the right tools on hand for when your creativity lags while working on a project. There are many ways to spark creativity, including using holiday calendars and other prompts like question lists, emerging trends and even other successful content in the space (write a response or counterpoint, don't plagiarize!).

Plan For The Quarter, Create for the Month, Manage by the Week

By strategically batching your planning, creation and engagement, you are able to create a cohesive narrative that emerges AND make it easier to come up with relevant ideas, create content more efficiently and respond in more meaningful ways. This is because you have an overarching framework to guide you.

What is your goal for the quarter? This should influence the content topics you want to cover. With that strategy, you can create individual content pieces for the coming month that are complementary to and build off of each other. And when you know what content is coming down the pipeline, you can use that in your engagement on specific pieces of content to foreshadow what's coming or build anticipation. You can also use that engagement to inform or tweak your planned content (your plan is a scaffold, not a cage).

Also, when you set time to engage with your audience in comments once or twice per week, it's easier to see themes and patterns emerge in what your audience thinks and wants.

Create Repeatable Systems and Processes

The plan/create/manage process above is just one of the systems I try to implement. I have a master list for the quarter that starts with what we want to accomplish. That leads to themes we want to hit. That, along with things like event and holiday calendars and lists of different types of content and how they perform historically, it makes it simple to come up with titles for all of the long-form content we want to produce for the quarter. That is broken down into monthly content calendars.

With these calendars, we sit down and create all of the content for the coming month over about a 3-day period. It's not all completely finished and polished by the end of this process, but it's about 85% of the way there.

For each long-form piece, we have a worksheet that starts with the title. From there we take a look at our brand script and pull out 3-5 lines that should inform the content.

Then we create an outline for the piece and then the finished piece.

From there we pull out the key takeaways for each of our key customer personas

Those takeaways are then used as springboards for a multitude of social media content pieces across multiple platforms. Some will be used immediately, others are pushed to a "content bank" we can use in the future to continue to drive traffic to the long-form piece over time.

So, over the course of about a week, we create all of the long-form content for the month, most of the social media content for the month AND develop a content bank that will allows us to continue to provide a breadth of varied content types across our platforms well into the future. This is all made possible by the content calendars and content worksheets we developed. Now, if someone is out, another person could easily step in to pick up the slack just by working through the steps as outlined in these tools.

Take Scheduled Breaks

As with any exercise, your creative muscles can get fatigued. It's important to take scheduled breaks to keep yourself fresh and creative. If you don't, your content will suffer in quality and quantity. You may even completely unplug from the internet so that your mind can wander and come up with new ideas.

Taking breaks can also help to keep you on target. It's easy to get wrapped up in your work and lose track of time, but by taking a break every once in a while, you're able to evaluate what you've done so far and how much time you have left. This will help you stay on track and avoid working for too long without a break.

Delegate or Outsource

If you're not careful with your time management skills, it's very easy to start becoming overwhelmed by all of the responsibilities that come with Social Media Marketing. It can be difficult to keep up with all of your duties without sacrificing quality or quantity in either category. Delgating or outsourcing tasks that (a) don't require a huge amount of specialized knowledge, (b) are repetitous but time-consuming or (c) things you aren't great at or don't enjoy in the process can save large chunks of your time AND keep you from experiencing overwhelm or burnout.

Clearly Define What Platforms You Will Use, Why You Are There, and HOW You'll Engage

Social media platforms are a necessary part of any business' marketing strategy. However, not all social media platforms are created equal, and not every platform is right for every business. It's important to clearly define which social media platforms you will use and why you're using them. Additionally, it's important to establish how you will engage with your audience on each platform. This will help ensure that your time is spent in the most effective way possible!

Use a Quantity AND Quality Two-Front Attack Strategy

When you're producing high-quantity content, it's important to remember that you're also doing some experimentation. You're trying out new things to see what content lands best with your audience. This is the only way to determine what your audience wants and what they respond to. It's also a way to determine what content you should be focusing on producing in higher quantities.

Producing quality content is important, but it's not always possible to produce perfect pieces every time. By using a quality two-front attack strategy, you're able to continually evolve your content while also refining the pieces that landed the best. This will help you develop a body of work that is truly exceptional and will be appreciated by your audience!

Repurpose Content & UGC

When it comes to social media marketing, creating high-quality content is essential. However, it's not always possible to produce brand new pieces of content every time you want to post something. This is where repurposing your content and user-generated content (UGC) come in handy!

Repurposing your content means taking a piece of content that you've already created and using it in a different way. For example, you could take a blog post and turn it into a video or an infographic. You could also use excerpts from previous blog posts to create social media posts.

UGC is any type of content that is created by someone other than the business or brand. This could be a customer review, a photo or a conversation in comments on a blog or social media post.

Decide NOT To Do Some Things

There are many things that you can do to improve your productivity, but one of the most important is to decide what NOT to do. This means eliminating distractions, delegating tasks and saying no to requests that will take you away from your goals. Unless you are absolutely essential to a particular meeting that someone wants you to be a part of, try this: "Oh, no. That sounds really interesting, but I already have something scheduled for that time. I'd love to see what got discussed in the meeting if anyone's taking notes, and if I have any thoughts I'd be happy to let you know. Thanks for the invite, though!"

By using these time management tips, you'll be able to save time while also producing high-quality content. You'll also be better equipped to handle the demands of social media marketing. Remember to tailor these tips to fit your own personal needs and always stay focused on your goals!

What are some of your favorite time management tips for social media? Let us know in the comments below!