8 top tips to introduce social media to efficiency

Social media can be a black hole for your time if you’re not careful. Whether it’s trying to think of ideas, posting every day or the dreaded doom scrolling to find relevant pages to follow, we’re all guilty of it.

Here at Pink Spaghetti we don’t have time to allow the social media demons to be time consuming. Here are 8 of our favourite tips to help you power through and avoid being dragged to the depths.

Write and create posts in batches

Trying to post ‘in the moment’ is great, but it’s also not the most efficient way to do your social media.

If you’re the type of person who doesn’t look forward to sitting down and writing a social media post (which is most of us, if we’re being honest!), then doing smaller chunks more often isn’t always the best idea.

As with most things, once you’re in the flow it actually becomes easier - and you’re more likely to hit that flow if you’re writing more than 2 or 3 posts. Even if you end up doing text and graphics separately, the overall amount of time you spend creating the month's posts might actually end up being less than sitting down 4 times in the month to create 2-3 posts.

If actually coming up with the content ideas is a struggle, keep a small notebook on you or use the notes app on your phone. When you have a ‘must post about that’ moment - jot it down ready for your next content session so you’ve always got a list of post ideas.

Nothing disturbs the creative flow more than random interruptions, so try to block out some time when you can set yourself up for a few hours, turn off notifications and get into the groove. You’ll be amazed at how easy it becomes once the first couple are out of the way!

Plan and schedule

Plan your content with a social media calendar. Planning content takes out all of the guesswork. If you like to create content based around national days or weekly themes it would be beneficial to start planning content a month or so before. By doing this you can easily see which days you are posting on and about what to see what days need to be filled up and what would be good to follow along from the last post.

By scheduling your posts you don’t have the daunting thoughts of taking a few minutes out to post every few days. I know the pains of copy and pasting from one platform to another. Sometimes, more often than not it sometimes feels like, things go wrong and at this point you hope the social media demon takes you away so you don’t need to deal with the issue anymore.

By using apps or systems to schedule posts such as the classic Meta Business Suite, or even something like Gain, Postoplan, or Hootsuite, it takes all of that out as everything is in the same place. In the time it takes you to post one post across different apps you could have scheduled five, saving you a lot of time.

Stop letting the social media demons win and schedule those posts instead.

Outsource if you don't have time

The reason we do what we do here at Pink Spaghetti is because we realise people don’t have time for many tasks, including posting on social media. It's too time consuming for so many reasons and we aren’t just talking about posting. You need to think about creating content, coming up with ideas, making graphics, finding hashtags, following new and relevant businesses, making connections, putting things on your story, doing a social media health check, replying to comments and messages... Do I need to go on or are you as exhausted as me just reading that list?

If you don’t have time for social media, or feel you don’t have the skills and knowledge, then why not think about outsourcing?

All we need to know is what your business is, what your branding is, what platforms you’d like to use and how often you’d like to post and we can do the rest, with your sign off of course.

The list of things to do with social media when you outsource is massively shorter than doing it yourself so take the leap and save yourself some time for other important things, or even just a break… It’s overwhelming isn’t it?

Don't be afraid to repeat content

I can’t even begin to explain how many times we’ve heard ‘I can’t use that, we did something similar a few weeks ago’.

We understand where this comes from; a lot of people think they need to be coming up with fresh and new ideas every single post and get very stuck in the mindset of ‘it has to be different’. However, it can be a little hard to find fresh and new ideas every time.

When people look at social media and your page as a whole they want things to be consistent and won’t criticise a post worded differently but having the same underlying message.

Don’t be afraid to stick to your one trick, within that trick there could be lists of topics you can repeat. Spend some time jotting down some topic ideas or phrases you want to use so when you feel in a post slump you have something to look back on for inspiration.

Overall, reusing posts will relay a message you want to get out about your business and will save you time trying to plan new ways to say the same thing.

Pick your platforms

This is a bit of a strange one but stay with me. You may be thinking ‘surely it’s best to post across all platforms possible so it gets more reach’. Theoretically you should be right, but unfortunately that isn't the way anymore.

New studies have shown that people who use Instagram will mainly use Instagram and mostly ignore other platforms. This is mainly in younger people, while people in the generation above will stick firmly to Facebook and not really use any other platforms. LinkedIn tends to be work related content and where B2B companies hang out, so make sure to pick your platforms wisely and direct your money, time and energy in the direction that'll have the most impact.

For example: if young people or fast moving trends is your target market, Instagram and TikTok might be where you need to focus your energy. Alternatively, if you're targeting businesses then you might want to go all in on LinkedIn.

A bit of market research will pay off in a big way if you put it to good use, so find out where your target market are and go to them rather than expecting them to find you (because they probably won't!).

By cutting out platforms that won’t work for your business you stop putting time, money and energy into a big hole never to be seen again. Find the platform that will give back.

Post on stories

More and more people look at stories rather than scrolling on social media nowadays, especially on Instagram, so make sure you are using stories just as much, if not more than actual social media posts.

The time it takes to post a quick picture with some text on a story or plan week long story highlights is about a quarter of the time it takes to write and schedule a post as short, snappy and to the point is best when it comes to stories.

Stories are also a great use to show a ‘BTS’ (behind-the-scenes) peek, which customers tend to love! If you have a delivery of new products then whack that up, having a team meeting? Get a group picture!

You can also increase engagement and interaction using stories by mentioning another business or person in your story or reposting another person’s post onto your story. They might even repost it, meaning your post is being seen by all their followers. This is access to a whole new audience for nothing!

Using stories is a quick and easy way to get information across without everything having to be a post and can easily boost interaction.

Set aside time for social checks

It's all well and good saying you need to check social media but if you don't set aside a certain time per day you could end up forgetting. Failing that you may check too many times or get stuck in a loop of doom scrolling where the social media demon comes for you again.

If you look, for example, at setting aside 5/10 minutes per day between the hours of 11am and 12pm to look at notifications and to reply to any comments or messages you could save yourself a bucket load of time and energy and make sure you don’t miss a thing.

If you want to be even more efficient when it comes to checking social media you could try out the new 555 trick. The way it works is when doing social media checks you like 5 posts, comment on (or repost to your story) 5 different posts all within 5 minutes. It is a very simple and effective way to check your socials, boost interaction and not lose hours doing it.

Don’t let doom scrolling win. Set a timer, like those posts, reply to those comments or messages. Get in, get it done, get out. Job done!

Measure results

This is the most important tip that we could give people doing social media, masure your results!

If you don’t know what’s working, how do you know what to do more of? To know whats working and what isn’t, you need to be tracking your metrics.

By either simply having a scroll through your page, looking at insights or going through archived stories you can easily see what’s done well and what hasn’t so you can plan to throw out ideas that haven’t done well and build on ideas that have soared.

To step this up even further you could look at keeping a quick and simple spreadsheet where you show what time and date something was posted, what it was about, how many likes it got and how many comments or shares it got.

However if you’d rather keep the admin to a minimal then a lot of platforms have this data set up, you can look back 30 days, 6 months or even a year to view your best performing posts!

Always keep track of your progress, the good, the bad and the ugly. It will help you save time more than you realise.

By following these 8 easy steps you can start to introduce your own social media to efficiency and save yourself some much needed time.

A few other thing to remember are:

Accept your mistakes, if something hasn't gone your way, don't dwell on it. Social media is a learning curve for everyone.

Learn from your actions - what didn't go well and why didn't it go well? How can you learn from this and mold it into something that will succeed? On the flip side of this, what did go well and why did it go well? Learn what works for you and what your audience wants to see.

And finally, celebrate wins. Make sure you celebrate the fact that a post did well, give yourself a pat on the back for creating a story that people liked and if a post didn’t do so well, then why are you worrying? No one saw it anyway!

So, what are you waiting for? Get off social media and put these tips to use.