Whether you are a digital marketing agency or have an internal marketing team that manages your social media, these three tips will quickly help boost productivity.
Tip 1: Plan Ahead with a Social Media Content Calendar
Social media calendars are a great way to plan and curate content; allocate advertising budgets and track results. Creating a social media content calendar might seem like a daunting task, but once you find the right template or come up with your own, it will save you time in the long run.
You can start with creating a list with all the dates that are important to your business such as holidays, annual events, grand openings, product launches, etc. Add statutory holidays that may affect your business operations so you can schedule posts in advance. As soon as you know the topics of your posts you can start assigning them to copywriters and graphic designers so they would have plenty of time to research, plan and execute. One of the advantages of content calendars is that they show a bigger picture of your activities on social media and help identify the channels on which you are posting too often or not giving enough attention.
Social Media Content Calendar (source: info.supadupa.me)
With a social media calendar on hand, you will be able to allocate resources for your promotional and advertising activities. For instance, if you are planning to run a holiday giveaway, your content calendar will include the number of posts that will be boosted and promoted on social media as well as include advertising budgets. Keep in mind that social media calendars are not editorial calendars and we will explain why in our next article.
Tip 2: Schedule Posts with Social Media Management Tools
There are many powerful social media management tools that help manage multiple social media accounts. With the right management tool on hand and a growing presence on all the major social media networks, social media can become your top source of site traffic and lead generation. Here are just a few reasons why you may want to consider using a social media management tool:
1. Schedule Your Content to Save Time
By planning and scheduling your posts in advance, you can make sure that your social media activities are not affected by back-to-back meetings or out-of-the-office days.
2. Target the Right Audience
If you are selling internationally or your audience is in different time zones, or if you want to hit a certain peak hour, you can create and schedule multiple posts at once, and they will be published at specific times.
3. Monitor Social Media Channels
By using social media management tools, you will be able to monitor your profiles and pages for comments and mentions and respond in a timely manner. In other words, instead of logging in to accounts every time you receive an email notification when someone sends a direct message or leaves a comment, you will be able to see all engagements in one place.
While scheduling social media posts is effective and saves time, you will also need to post on-the-fly content that is trending in order to connect with your audience.
Tip 3: Create Visual Social Media Templates and Guidelines
It is recommended to update your social media profiles with new banner images every time you have a new promotional campaign whether it is a holiday giveaway, product launch or contest. By having pre-sized templates with the right dimensions for all social media channels, you can easily customize them for any campaign. Make sure that these templates work for desktop, tablet and mobile devices.
You can create visual templates for infographics or SlideShare presentations that are great to generate traffic and increase the shareability of your posts. Make sure that you add a logo or a simple link to your site and keep it consistent. Consider using the same font style or similar visual effects and colour schemes for all your visual content.
Many major companies have branding guidelines. But every brand whether it is small or large should have a branding guide to make sure that every visual element is consistent both online and in traditional media.
About iRISEmedia
iRISEmedia.com is a Toronto digital marketing and social media marketing agency, specializing in web design, SEO, social media marketing, online PR and more. Our team helps clients increase their reach and profitability by developing and implementing customized and targeted online and social media marketing strategies. We service clients in Toronto, Ontario, the GTA and throughout Canada as well as globally.
