7 Time-Saving Strategies for Your Social Media Management

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by Melanie Tamble | Last revised on
December 5, 2020
Social media has become an indispensable tool for corporate communication. However, social media management has also become a particularly challenging task, which can become painstakingly time-consuming. Saving time on social media management is thus a pressing issue to reach your goals successfully as well as efficiently.
Social media is a never-ending stream of an ongoing conversation. And it becomes harder every day to keep up with millions of social posts, comments, and ongoing discussions.
Corporate communication teams usually have multiple social media accounts on various social networks. And there seems to be never enough time to engage, post, and share constantly as well as monitor your brand and respond to comments and discussions. Not to forget the time you need to figure out what to post and to create valuable content for your ideas.
In corporate communication, social media marketing is usually integrated into many other marketing and communication responsibilities. That will make social media management all the more hard-pressed for time. Keeping up with the never-ending activity on social networks can feel like moving in a hamster wheel. And that makes focussing on strategies for bundling resources and optimizing efficiency all the more pressing.
I have compiled a list of tips that my team and I use for social media management with Blog2Social to help save time, bundle resources, as well as grow and engage with our audience.
The following 10 tips from real-life experience will help you to save time on painstaking social media routine tasks to get better results in less time. 
1. Focus on a social media strategy
Social media can be horribly distracting. There are so many things to see every single second you take a look at your social streams. Too much information can overload the brain and makes it difficult to focus on the important tasks you have to do.
To keep your mind on track, focus on your social media strategy. 
Having a social media strategy and a set of goals in place is the key element of an efficient workday. Many results fall short because the tasks required to reach the goals are not properly executed.
Social media strategy will set the road map for your social media management. Having a set of goals on your mind will help you to focus your mind on the right tasks. If you focus on results, you can save time, resources, and energy.  
The better you know your audience, the better you can focus on the best social channels and the right content to attract your audience and match their needs.
2. Plan your content well in advance
Planning ahead and creating ideas for your predictable content needs well in advance can save you tons of time. An editorial plan will take out the everyday guesswork on what to post, where to post, and when to post. 
Once you can refer to a social media strategy, you can line out what kind of content you will need to reach your goals as well as:
What to share
When to share 
How often to share
An editorial plan will leave you with more time for creating better content. When you have enough time to create and produce your content base, you don’t have to do everything under time pressure, which will most likely end up in stress and overtime to keep your due date. A content plan will provide you an overview of your content needs and will leave you more space to create, produce, and to engage with your content and community. 
3. Repurpose your content
Coming up with a consistent flow of outstanding content is one of the biggest challenges in content marketing and corporate communication. In the continuous stream of social media updates, most content flows by unnoticed. To save time for creating and producing new content that goes to waste, focus on a strategy to refresh, re-compose, and repurpose your best content instead . If you have content that performed well in the past, repurpose this content to revive it. Updating and refreshing your evergreen content helps you to make the most of your cornerstone content. Once you have put much effort into creating well-performing content, you should make the most of it.
There are multiple ways to repurpose content, for example:
Convert your content into other formats, for example, visual content and audio content like infographics, videos, podcasts.
Create a content library for your best performing content and your evergreen content to keep all content formats in one place so that each team member can easily find and repurpose content.
Refresh older posts with current data and statistics.
Divide long-form content into a series.
Extend short-form content into follow-ups to focus on specific aspects, feedback, and open questions from your community.
Reassemble your content to create micro-content.  
Publish and re-share your content on more channels by following a cross-promotion plan and a seeding plan for each piece of content.
All these strategies will help you to save time on content creation and production and get more reach, engagement, and traffic for your existing content.
4. Use content curation
Content curation is another strategy to save time and resources on content creation and production. Sharing valuable content from industry sites or other trusted third party sources, or any other content your audience might be interested in, you can fill your social media channels without mass-producing content yourself. 
Content curation will not only save your time but also help to build relationships with influencers in your industry or niche. If you share curated posts with @mentions, you will be automatically networking with your sources. The @handle will automatically notify them that their content is shared. Everybody loves to see that their content is being valued and shared by others. That will make it more likely that they will engage with your content or share your content with their communities.  
A perfect content mix consisting of original content and curated content, and some personal content will keep your social media streams populated with a consistent stream of multi-variant content.
5. Use a social media calendar 
With an editorial plan and a social media calendar, you can plan out your posts for days, weeks, or months ahead. A social media calendar will provide you with an overview of what to post, when to post, and where to post. Following a fixed schedule will make it much easier to organize your daily work routine and to stay focussed and organized. 
Planning your social media week
With a social media calendar, you can:
Fill your social media calendar with all your content for predictable updates and events. 
Easily detect and fill content gaps and spaces for current news and events
Organize and review, and collaborate on tasks with corporate communication teams and colleagues.
Following a social media calendar will leave you with more time for monitoring and engaging with your audience. 
6. Schedule your social media tasks 
If you devote a specific time slot each day to fulfill specific social media tasks will help you not to get distracted and stay focussed and organized. 
For example, devote 10-15 minutes each morning and another 10-15 minutes in the afternoon to monitor all of your social channels. Keeping a specific time frame to organize responses and updates will help you to stay ahead of your social accounts without being distracted by them all day long.
Having a fixed schedule for your social media tasks will make it much easier to organize your daily work routine and to stay focussed and organized.  
7. Use automation tools to share your content 
Scheduling content with the help of a social media automation tool and a social media calendar will help you to take the pain out of many tasks for your daily social media routine for sharing and seeding your content. 
Social media tools make your life easier by managing all your social media accounts in one place to edit posts, schedule posts, repeat posts, and curate content. They save you from managing your accounts in each social network separately. 
Social media automation will make it easier to prepare and schedule your social media posts well in advance and then forget about them to focus your mind on other tasks. 
Scheduling your social media posts automatically will ensure your content gets published at the right time to reach the right audience. You won’t have to keep your mind locked up on what, when, and where to post any longer.
With a separate time-schedule for each social media network, you can schedule your social media posts to share them automatically at the best times for each network and community.
Best Time Schedule for Social Media
Summing up
Social media management can easily consume tons of time in corporate communication. However, focussing on a social media strategy and following an editorial plan will help you to plan ahead and stay organized. A social media calendar helps you to prepare and organize your content across your social media accounts. Finally, social media automation will save you time from your daily routine work and manually populating your feeds. Following these strategies can save you a whole lot of your time for managing your social media channels.