If you recently began using social media as a way to build your business, it can be difficult to find the time on a daily basis to blog, Tweet, and update your Facebook page. When so many other tasks demand your attention, justifying even 10 minutes a day to social media can be hard.
Many businesses hire social media consultants to assist them with planning – and executing – a social media strategy. A good consultant will craft a strategy that helps you develop an external voice while providing you the tools to enhance your Twitter and Facebook image and presence. A social media policy should be developed, protecting you, your business, and your employees.
If hiring a consultant isn’t in the budget, enhancing and building your social media presence isn’t out of the question. Decide what’s the largest barrier to social media in your business and tackle it.
For many businesses, it’s simply a lack of time. You know it’s important to engage and interact with your customers – but so are many other things on your plate.
One of the easiest ways to begin developing a consistent voice is to use a social media tool specifically created for managing your company’s social media presence – and regularly schedule content to be published.
Scheduling tweets and posts will save you time. Instead of checking in every 15 minutes and finding something to say, carve out time in the morning, or the night before, or even the week before, and schedule those posts.
Scheduling allows you to generate relevant content.
Instead of hurriedly posting irrelevant links and Tweets because you have to, plan ahead your content by scheduling it to go out. If you’ve got interesting factoids about your company, schedule a few randomly through the day. Don’t just schedule original and relevant content – schedule replies and re-Tweets, too. Space it out and schedule in the time zone of your targeted demographic. If your customer base is global rather than national, use scheduling to post content when they’re most likely to read it – in their time zone.
If you’re scheduling replies, make sure to respond back if a conversation begins. If a few hours have passed, make reference to what you were responding to, so the user knows what you’re talking about. Replies with simply “:)” or “great post!” don’t do much to engage. Give substance. “Great post on that employment survey. You’re spot-on with your analysis,” or something similar.
Maintain your image via consistent engagement.
Scheduling Tweets regularly through the day gives the impression there is someone behind the desk, maintaining the account and interacting with followers. No one-man-show, here. A consistent stream through the day is much more manageable and less annoying for your followers than dumping 15 Tweets of similar content in their stream in a matter of minutes.
Control the message through scheduling.
Embrace social media in the workplace and give logins to your employees, encouraging them to post content. By assigning different roles, your contributors are encouraged to actively post but you maintain control of the content through editorial review and an approval queue.
With 70 million Tweets a day, it’s vital your content is engaging, relevant, and interesting. Scheduling helps you achieve this. Follow users that fit in your customer base and make those Tweets count.
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