In this episode of Actionable Marketing In Minutes we give the 5 most important social media tasks for you to perform every day.
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Problem:
Stephen Covey said “The key is not to prioritize what’s on your schedule, but to schedule your priorities.” With digital marketing, especially social media, there are new things constantly rising to the surface that are vying for our attention. Yet, you have only a limited amount of time to spend each day on digital marketing. To be successful, it is important to have a social media strategy, and to schedule your priorities to maximize your time and efforts.
By focusing on the high-value activities, you can make the most of your limited time. Here are the social media tasks that we think should be scheduled as your priorities.
Solution:
I’d like to pause for a minute to mention an ebook we’ve developed called: Social Media Best Practices and Policies. We’ve created this resource to help you with your social media strategy. Social media marketing is important for all businesses. While this podcast will touch on one aspect of it, I encourage you to download our Social Media Marketing Best Practices guide for more insights and tips on how to effectively execute social media marketing programs—and get a leg up on the competition. Download the ebook by clicking on the link in the podcast description
1. Manage an Editorial Calendar: Your editorial calendar should have a monthly overview and a detailed daily task list. What this means is that you should have multiple layers within your calendar so you can easily view the big-picture as well as the individual to-dos and posts. We recommend that your calendar be prepared at least a month in advance, if not quarterly, with room to add last minute content as needed—and don’t forget to coordinate with your other digital and offline marketing activities as well!
2. Schedule Posts: Once your calendar is in place, you will want to schedule your content to go out on various networks. Scheduling your content during a single session on a weekly or monthly basis allows you to work most efficiently—spending time on your priorities such as strategy and content development/curation rather than on tactical execution. Great aggregate services are now available such as Hootsuite, Tweet Deck, Sprout Social, or Buffer.
3. Curate Content: When you curate content, you are collecting and sharing news and information developed by other creators. This is a great way to offer value to your prospects and followers who are constantly being bombarded by postings and information from other companies just boasting about their own services. Curated content helps build authority and provides a convenient place for your target audience to go for news from a variety of sources.
4. Listen to Your Audience: Too often businesses get bogged down with pushing out the message they want their market to hear; not the message their market wants to hear. In order to effectively communicate with your audience, you will need to know and use the right language, avoid jargon, and tell a compelling story. Do your research, and really
understand what it is that your target market wants to hear, understand how they feel about you and your product/service, and give them what they need from you.
5. Review Analytics: We live in an instant gratification society. And luckily for social media gurus, social media has no shortage of instant feedback. Prioritize the review of analytics so that you have a truly polished and deep understanding of what worked and what didn’t, what your audience engaged with and what they avoided. Analytics will help understand what happened and can guide you on how to adjust your strategy accordingly.
Benefits:
The benefits of the prioritizing, organizing and scheduling your social media tasks are that you can:
* Stay on message
* Use your time most efficiently
* Provide a thought-out and valuable service to your audience.
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People talks about the Time Management Matrix. The matrix has urgent activities in one axis and important activities in the other. Ideally we should be spending our time in the non-urgent, important quadrant. If we don’t prioritize, most of us find ourselves in the not-urgent, not-important quadrant spending time on activities that distract rather than promote success. Avoid this pitfall, schedule your priorities and try to stay focused on those activities so that you can get the most out of your social media strategy.
We hope you’ve found this information helpful. Please connect with us on Twitter @DirectiveGroup or on LinkedIn. Let us know what you think and what you’d like to hear about next. And if you like our podcasts, please share with your networks using hashtag #actionablemarketing. Join us for an upcoming podcast as we discuss Changes in mobile ads – image searches for PLA’s
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