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5 Quick Tips for Improving Your Social Media Productivity

September 23, 2014

There is no medium possibly more demanding than that of social media. The sheer dynamic nature of the medium impinges on one to constantly be on their toes; forever trying to monitor, manage and update a plethora of social media pages and profiles. Thankfully, there are ways to do this better and smarter. In an ode to the precious commodity that is time here are 5 simple, easy to adopt habits every social media community manager can swear by if they hope to have a life while managing a platter of social media assets.

1. Adopt an editorial calendar for managing blogs: If having a white board that enlists content schedule for the week/month is not sophisticated enough for you, there is always technology to bank upon. We at Brightpod use one too.

There are plenty of great editorial calendars out there that can help you plan and regularize your blog posting schedule. Tools such as Hubspot Editorial Calendar and Wordpress Editorial Calendar are freely available while there are some paid applications out there for more customized and sophisticated task coordination. The good part about adopting a tool such as this is that when working with a team of content contributors collaborating efforts becomes much more hassle free and posts get updated like clockwork.

2. Opt for content curation to discover relevant content easily: If it can be done by an algorithm, there isn’t quite any need for manual intervention. Content curation works because it helps accelerate the process of discovering relevant content for your social media endeavors — be it for a corporate blog or a brand’s Facebook page. Not only does content curation reduce your burden to constantly come up with great content it also provides more value to your audience, seeing that they can rake in lateral perspectives from curated content.

Now, there are plenty of content curation tools available, including pocket (a personal favorite), pinterest (look up Pinterest for Business to understand how you can leverage promoted pins for your brand) , scoop.it (you can ‘scoop’ great content and have them presented in a fun magazine- like layout), feedly ( RSS simplified, in a nut shell) and so many more, which can be scouted through a google search, followed by a trial run or by requesting a free demonstration. Choose the one which best fits your social agenda.

3. Automate more in order to plan better: This in no way means that you completely start running on auto-pilot mode, but merely that you should automate tasks that can do with less manual intervention. The task of scheduling posts on Facebook, for instance, can be automated using its own built-in scheduling tool seen for Facebook Business Pages. Similarly, many community managers regularly use HootSuite dashboard or Buffer (and other similar tools) to co-ordinate the task of publishing posts across multiple social media platforms at a stipulated time frame. Not only does this save you from constantly being on a reactive mode it helps queue-up content in a way that makes the said content more time (and occasion) appropriate.

4. Get relevant leverage tools for each social medium you work with: Scheduling posts is merely an end but things like ‘when to publish a post’, ‘how often to publish or pin something’ is yet another art. Once again, there are plenty of web applications to ease this particular problem as well. For the sake of explanation let’s take tools like Tweroid or SocialBro that are capable of helping you tweet at an opportune time when you followers are likely to be most active. For Pinterest savvy managers, tools like ViralWoot, Curalate and Viraltag can definitely come in handy for publishing exciting visual imagery. These particular set of tools even help you understand what is being pinned by your followers from you website and related analytics of the same. Simply put, the idea behind adopting these leverage tools is so that you post the right thing at the ‘right time’.

5. Don’t be afraid to revisit great content: It may be an act of sheer pompousness or an action borne out of the fact that you may be facing ‘content block’. But don’t be afraid of revisiting an outstanding piece of chef-d’oeuvre and re-sharing it. Some content pieces are timeless and can, in fact, be republished. There are always people who would be seeing it for the first time. However, exercise caution when doing so. It’s only OK to do this once in a while and not as a habitual cave-in.

While these are only some of the tips I could conjure up from my own experience and that of my colleagues, there are plenty more ways of bringing productivity into your social media marketing endeavors. Do share your productivity tricks with us as well.

Brightpod

Project management software for smart marketing teams.

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