Business owners flying solo have unique challenges when it comes to marketing their business, but the greatest challenge seems to be a lack of time to do it everything on their own. I hear you. I have been flying solo for many years now and I can tell you from experience, it’s not easy. To help you out, I’m sharing my seven best time-saving social media tips.
These tips will help you to effectively market your business on social media and get you back to doing more important things. We all have a life outside of our business, so let’s do this!
Time-Saving Social Media Tips for Busy Solopreneurs
Identify Your Target Audience
In the past, I have written many blog posts and social media posts on the topic of getting to know your target audience. The reason for that is that it is the single most important thing any good business needs to do to have a successful and profitable business.
It also saves you loads of time. For your social media marketing to be efficient and effective, you need to be marketing your business to the right people. Otherwise, you are wasting time with every word you write and every product you create.
All of your marketing efforts need to be focused on this target audience, meaning that you need to identify them to know how to market to them. If you haven’t already done so, stop everything and do some market research right now to figure it out before you waste another moment of time.
Create a Content Strategy
If you know who your audience is, the next major step in marketing is to create a content strategy to get you there. To do this, you need to know what your target audience’s pain points are and create content around solving the top three.
For example, my audience struggles with getting started with social media marketing, making money, and never having enough time. So, those are my three pillars of content.
Once you figure out your three pillars, you need to set goals for how to get from where you are now, to where you want to be. Then create content ideas that will support that. Each piece of content should serve a purpose in growing, strengthening, and promoting your brand. This can be through sharing information, storytelling, or even humor.
You need to form a connection with your target audience through your content. If you haven’t done so already, I have a free workbook that you can download that will help you create hundreds of social media post ideas quickly and efficiently. You can check it out here.
Create a Content Calendar
A content calendar is a lifesaver. You won’t believe how much time you will save by simply planning out your content ahead of time. This makes it much easier to batch and create content for your social media platforms at one time and post the content throughout the week or month.
If you set SMART goals for your business, your goals and the deadlines for those goals will guide your content strategy and help you plan your content on your calendar in a way that you stay on track with your business goals.
Schedule Your Posts
You can use scheduling platforms to schedule your social media posts so that you don’t have to worry about the task every single day. Facebook and Instagram offer their own scheduler via the Meta Business Suite that is free to use for those platforms.
For many of the other platforms, you will need to find the right scheduler that meets your business needs. For example, Tailwind is my favorite Pinterest scheduling app, but apps like Metricool, Loomly, Buffer, Hootsuite, SEMrush, and Planoly offer scheduling on multiple platforms.
Each has its own advantages and disadvantages and while some offer free versions, others may cost you well over $100 a month. It’s important that you identify the social media platforms you wish to focus on and find which platforms include the amount of posting you need for your business.
If you use Pinterest, and I highly recommend it for many businesses, you need to be posting 8 to 11 times a day, but no fewer than 5 to grow on the platform. I used Tailwind to post 11 pins per day at optimal times for my audience and didn’t have a problem with my limits. However, some scheduling apps only include 50 to 100 posts and month, which is insufficient in my opinion for Pinterest.
Repurpose Content
Writing a blog post like this one is time-consuming and takes quite a bit of time and effort, so you better believe I’m going to use the content in this post on my social media platforms as content in one form or another. And you should do the same for your content.
For example, this content could be part of a list post, an infographic, or I could break it up into several smaller sections and turn it into multiple posts for my social media channels. This way, you do the research and planning once, then can keep posting different types of posts around the topic.
Repurposing old content is a great way to get more out of a popular post from the past. If it’s still valid, find a way to repurpose it or post the content to another platform. This is a major time-saving tip for social media that you can use again and again.
Get to The Point
I love to post carousels on Instagram, but they are almost as time-consuming as a blog post. I have found that by being as concise as I can and not going into quite so much detail, they tend to have a greater effect and significantly cut back on the amount of time that I spend on each post.
Likewise, if a carousel requires a lot of writing, it is better to break it up into multiple pieces of content or save it for a blog post (which I will repurpose).
On Instagram, the average user spends less than 30 minutes on the platform, so it’s best to get to the point fast. Using an eye-catching template to create the post is another huge time-saver that is well worth the investment.
Limit Distractions
The best way to get through the entire process of creating and scheduling social media content is to limit as many distractions as possible. This may require that you do most of the work while your kids are asleep or watching an entertaining movie or get up at an earlier hour when you know you won’t be disturbed.
I typically wait until my husband is at work and my cat is down for her three-hour-long afternoon siesta. As someone with ADHD, anything that breaks my focus can significantly impact my productivity because it’s very difficult to get back into what I was doing.
Other Considerations
Although these tips will help you get your social media marketing content planned and scheduled out, there are some things that you just can’t schedule or avoid.
My greatest concern when I schedule my social media posts is engaging with my audience. On platforms like Instagram, engagement is everything. If you have engaged with a person on Instagram, they are much more likely to see your posts in their feed or on Explore.
It’s best to post around the same time of day every day and engage with others about 20 minutes before and after you post. This is a bit much for me, so I might like and comment on the posts of my followers beforehand or check out the followers of a competitor and like and comment on their most recent post.
I get distracted sometimes, but engaging on my computer is more effective for me because the distractions are fewer. I can engage with more accounts, more efficiently this way.
You may want to make it a habit to hop online for a few minutes if you have any free moments. Engaging here and there, when you’re in line at the grocery store, or commuting on a bus or train can go a long way to improving your social media performance.
Create Content More Effectively and Efficiently
With these tips, you will be able to save loads of time on your social media marketing. Putting a little time upfront into understanding your audience and creating content around their needs will go a long way to ensuring that you spend less time planning social media posts and more time doing what you value most.
