7 Ways to Stay Focused With Your Social Media Marketing in the New Year
Do you find that you are spending too much time on social media, but not getting much accomplished? What you need is a well-planned strategy in order to leverage this incredibly powerful tool for building your business online.
You should have your core goals and metrics laid out from the very beginning. Ask yourself questions such as:
- What do you want to use social media for?
- Are you trying to meet JV partners?
- Do you want to land speaking engagements?
- Does your brand need more exposure?
- Are you trying to build up your follower count?
- Do you need to drive more traffic to your site for more sales?
An example of this is tracking the virality of your social content and the number of followers per day. On the other hand, if your focus is on conversion rates, then you will want to gather metrics on visitors to your website.
Start your planning by figuring out what your marketing goals are, then focus on the data that is most important to that strategy.
Decide which social networks you should be on the most — this is where your niche community is active and engaged. For instance, If getting more speaking engagements is your main goal, then LinkedIn and Twitter may be your first choices over Facebook or Instagram.
How to Spend Your Time on Social Media
Create an outline of how you plan to spend your time, which might look like this:
- Monday: Take an hour of your day to schedule posts and tweets for the week with follow up conversations from the weekend
- Tuesday: Dedicate an hour for networking in places like LinkedIn and Facebook Groups
- Wednesday: Use a couple of hours to communicate with influencers and bloggers in your niche
- Thursday: Engage in your social networks and answer any customer questions
- Friday: Segment your activities into different “buckets.” When your time in one bucket runs out, move on. Don’t let yourself get sucked into one thing for too long.
Take an inventory of what you are currently doing right now in your marketing strategy — which items can you remove? You’ll find that the most important things are what you need to start focusing on. Have a schedule and stick to it. You should eliminate anything from your workday that causes you to miss a deadline.
At the start of each week create your essential actions in order to prioritize tasks and leave room for building your audience and deepening your connection with your community.
Tailor your outreach according to your goals such as leaving valuable comments on blogs and social media posts. If you’re trying to build a Facebook audience, your strategy might involve engaging in niche groups and sharing helpful content.
It’s important to remember that social media is all about the value of a single person. Your biggest breakthroughs can come from the most unexpected places — the key is to be consistent with authentic relationship building.
When the opportunity arises reach out and get in touch with people one on one. Acknowledge your fans and build real connections.
Your Plan is Not Set in Stone
The marketing process should be natural, organic, and grows as your audience grows. Treat your plan as a living document — this will help you stay on track as you progress in your goals.
Here are seven ways your business can stay focused on your social media marketing strategy:
1 – Leave Personal Social Networking at Home
It’s easy to get distracted while going through your own accounts. Dedicate specific time just for your business. This in itself can dramatically improve your productivity, and you may find that you are spending even less time on social media.
2 – Separate Business Building from Marketing
Once you have a specific schedule and plan in place, this will enable you to have dedicated time just for your business such as offline networking, sales meetings, lead generation, content curation, etc.
It rarely works to manage social media while trying to taking care of other things that require your full attention. Avoid this type of multitasking and commit to doing social media during a specific time — this will train your brain to work in a more focused way.
3 – Create Daily Tasks
You can minimize your distractions by breaking up your time throughout the day with dedicated projects to accomplish. For example, social media management could include:
7:00 a.m. – Schedule Posts
7:30 a.m. – Respond to mentions, messages, comments, and retweets
8:00 a.m. – Follow up on email communication and interact with influencers
4 – Finish the Important Work First
Social media is an essential marketing venue, but it should never be more important than running your business. Try doing your marketing last along with anything that would detract you from accomplishing what you need to do in your day.
5 – Reign in Chats and Messages
Many social networks will have a chat program weaved into their basic functionality. Make sure those chat systems are in check and don’t allow these to disrupt your workday. Make it known to those in your network the right times they should contact you — a 15-minute conversation could quickly turn into 45 minutes.
Chats can throw your entire day out the window — use these sparingly, but don’t ignore them completely as they are still important to staying in touch with your community and handling customer service issues.
6 – Learn How To Outsource
Having someone to share in your social media management gives you a stronger framework to work in. Take advantage of professional freelancers or get a team member on board to help you schedule and manage content — this can really help boost your social media focus.
Tools like HootSuite and Buffer to schedule posts and updates can also allow you to communicate at the frequency that your followers expect, without having to distract yourself from your workday.
7 – Get Into The Habit of Measuring Your Progress
Your business needs to have clear metrics in order to stay driven. This will also allow you to know exactly when you’re on track and when you’re not. It will also help you to learn which content is being received well by your Fans and followers, which is very important when it comes to building an authentic and trusted brand.
Having more focus on your social media marketing will help you have more success with your online activities. This can help you to quickly stimulate your business growth in the new year.
Answer These 4 Questions to Aid Your Marketing Strategy
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Susan Gilbert
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