Social media is an integral part of any content marketing strategy, but it’s also a major time drain. Marketers are spending an average of 16-20 hours a week keeping up an active social presence for their brand.

But it’s easy to fall right down the rabbit hole and spend even longer – posting, commenting and all the related tasks (tagging, creating graphics, managing comments) even just one post requires.

If you don’t have a clear strategy and a way to organise campaigns and activities, you could lose more and more of your valuable time. This doesn’t just prevent you from working on other crucial content marketing activities, but it delivers poor ROI for the brand.

You need to work smart, focusing on measuring progress and achieving set targets.

Here are some useful tips to help you get organised:

Develop a clear content strategy – complete with targets and KPIs to measure progress
Without a strategy and goals to work towards, you’re effectively shooting in the dark. Having a plan helps you to manage your campaigns, and your time.

Use a content calendar
There are lots of persuasive reasons to use a content planner. It helps you to plan out a varied content mix that hits the key points in your strategy, and to manage your time more effectively. You can set out dedicated time to work on your calendar, getting everything ready in advance. This means no more posting on the fly, which leads to fewer typos and unprofessional-looking posts.

If you’re looking at using a content calendar, Hootsuite has a free template you can download.

Delegate
Social media marketing managers often feel the pressure to be always ‘on’. After all, social networks are a hive of activity 24/7.

But this can mean that managing social accounts starts to bleed into your home and personal life. You’ll end up responding to comments on a night out, or being woken up at night by the ping of a notification. It’s not a professional or sustainable way to work.

You have two ways to address this issue. The first is to establish boundaries for when accounts will be actively managed. The second, if you manage social accounts for a brand that needs round-the-clock management, is to delegate. Plan out a schedule for who’ll be keeping an eye on the brand’s socials, so that you’re covered at all times.

Prioritise quality over quantity
You already know this, but it’s always worth reminding yourself that a few quality posts are worth far more than a packed schedule of spamming.  It’s easy to feel that you should always be doing more, or panic that you’re not catching a particular segment of your target audience.

Focus on crafting content that tells your brand’s story and generates meaningful engagement with your audience. And make your posts more impactful by doing some research into the platforms your audience uses and when. This will give you the best chance of reaching your target customer and generating those all-important conversions.

Need expert help with social media marketing? Work with our content marketing specialists here at Nextgen Marketing – talk to us about your project.