Posting to social media can be time-consuming but it’s necessary to our blogs and online businesses. Getting results from Twitter means posting more than one-and-done style. You need to post multiple times during the day (remember the lifespan of a tweet is 18 minutes.) You need to monitor your results to refine your social media strategy. (Yes, Virginia, there is a strategy.) You need to automate your tweets.
Writing and manually posting tweets takes up a massive amount of time. Automating your tweets and other social media posts is vital to your success. When I decided to go from hobby blogging to blogging as a business I knew it would take hard work to get where I wanted to be. But I didn’t realize I would have days when I was feeling so overwhelmed with my to-do list that I wanted to give up. I was putting hours and hours into growing my blog and still falling short on reaching my goals. I had expected to put in hard work but I felt hard work should equal better results. My biggest time guzzler was scheduling my tweets. I needed to spend time working smart and not necessarily hard.
What’s in a Name
In the beginning, Twitter was my social media of choice (and at the time my only active social media network.) I fell in love with its cute little logo, the easy learning curve, and the accessible analytics. But don’t let its logo fool you–Twitter is not just for the birds. The entire platform was built to send people to other websites. There are 313 million monthly active users. Twitter is one of the social media networks that my potential readers/followers customers will most often use. It is easy to use it to monetize and, knock on wood, they don’t have the restrictions on monetizing that you find on Facebook or YouTube. To get the full benefit of this network I needed to get an auto-scheduler.
There are lots of auto-schedulers out there but I chose Hootsuite. I wanted something easy to set up, easy to use, something I could grow into and would deliver analytics complete enough to use to build my social media marketing strategy. Hootsuite delivered all that. Automating my tweets was one of the best business decisions I’ve made to date. It saves me time and the analytics that comes with automation give me a better understanding of my audience. I am able to develop an informed social media strategy.
Automate to Be Consistent
It’s not enough to just have valuable information and stellar content. It’s important to be consistent. People will begin to recognize your brand when you tweet consistently. You become familiar to them when you are appearing in their feed consistently with valuable information or content that is of interest to them. (You are becoming a “household name.”) The more familiar with you and your brand they become the more likely they are to trust you. Trust directly affects your traffic and sales. Scheduling you tweets means you don’t have to be online constantly. You can schedule more tweets without the worry. Now I not only schedule tweets but my Facebook and Instagram posts. I can schedule 100’s of messages weeks in advance. These form a skeleton of my social media posts. Then more immediately I can schedule posts on trending topics. This allows me to have more time to build relationships with my followers by taking time to engage with them.
Automate to Be More Productive
Not only can I schedule my social media on Hootsuite, but I’m also able to monitor my social media. This gives me the ability to see what others are saying about my blog and how they are interacting with my content.
Instead of spending my time every day trying to publish to each social media platform, I use Hootsuite to publish my social media. This allows me to allot that time to my content or my business. It also allows me to be strategic when it comes to my social media since I’m planning ahead. For example, posting to Instagram 2-3 times a day at intervals when I’m just starting off is crucial to growing my account. But this would be highly time-consuming task if I didn’t schedule these Instagram posts beforehand.
I am able to track and monitor all my social media platforms on the Hootsuite dashboard. In fact, I could run quite a lot of different online businesses and blogs and use one Hootsuite account to monitor social media accounts for all those businesses. Plus you receive a weekly analytics report!
Automate to Understand Your Audience and What They Want
Using Hootsuite has freed up more time to plan my strategy to use the social media networks to grow my blog. I can deep dive into my analytics to understand what content works and is popular with my audience and what content isn’t. More importantly, I‘m able to understand what the optimal times are for me to be posting to the different social media platforms. I can measure my campaigns and track their performance.
If you have not been scheduling your social media, my friends, it’s not too late to start. Start with the free version of Hootsuite.
There are lots of other social media schedulers/management tools you can also check out, such as Buffer, Later (for Instagram), Tailwind or Boardbooster (for Pinterest, I personally use Boardbooster) & more! Automating your social media is a key to increasing your productivity.
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