Social media can become a time drain if you aren’t using your time efficiently. While using it to build your digital brand requires a significant commitment of time and energy, you can maximize your time by putting your effort towards the activities that will achieve the best results. Here are some social media productivity hacks to enhance your digital brand.

Your target audience is actively engaging on social media every second of every day. It’s often difficult to keep up with everything happening in the space. You are expected to respond to questions, like posts, share content, produce content, be entertaining, be informative, be a little weird (but not too weird), all while trying to leverage social media to help your business. This process is overwhelming and can take valuable time out of your day.

So, here are some social media productivity hacks that will help you focus your time on what matters most.

Social Media Productivity Hacks

Start With a Clear Strategy

First things first, if you want to be successful on social media, you have to establish a strong social media strategy. This should go without saying but I must reinforce this notion. Out of all the social media productivity hacks I’ll mention in this post, the most important one is developing a strategy.

Nowadays, we often focus on creating a social media ad strategy, or a customer service strategy. Whatever happened to a strategy for building relationships.

Now, you’re probably saying to yourself: “Don’t these particular strategies naturally build relationships?”

Yes, they do.

But let’s flip this notion around and focus on building relationships and engaging with your audience on their terms instead of serving them ads.

This is the mindset that every digital brander must possess. In essence, they must make their brands more experiential and less transactional.

To do this correctly, you must answer the following questions:

Who do you want to reach and how will you reach them?

Ask yourself, “Who do I want to reach?” The answer may not be as obvious as it seems. For example, if you have two product lines, a high-performance product for super users, and a low-end more generic product, you may want to focus your social media efforts on potential users of the high-end product. These users may have a much higher likelihood of discussing your product on social media than the users of the low-end product.

What message do you want to convey? 

You must also determine the message you want to communicate on social media. The message you send may or may not align with your value proposition.

For example, let’s say your company strategy is to differentiate yourself by delivering pizza faster than competitors.

On social media, instead of focusing on your delivery service, you can concentrate on the ingredients of your pizza, or how the pizza is made, and the history of pizza. These tactics help you to position your brand as one delivering quality, authentic pizza.

What Are Your Social Media Objectives? 

It is also important to clarify your social media objectives. They can include:

1. Sales
2. Traffic to Website
3. Email Signups
4. Increased social visibility
5. Get repeat customer visits
6. Gain referrals
7. Get ideas for new products or services
8. Seek feedback on current products/services and delivery

When you have a list of clear social media objectives, be sure to align your communication with these goals.

SEE ALSO: How to Define A Branding Goal and Strategy

Creating Social Media Wins

“Focus on how to be social, not on how to do social.” – Jay Baer

Social media is more than just an opportunity to sell your product or service. A winning social media approach is about relationship building. It’s about authenticity and providing great value to your audience.

Here are some effective strategies for social media success.

Focus on Getting to Know Your Audience

If you know your audience well, you’ll have a good idea of what type of content to publish to stimulate interactions which can inspire them to give you their business. 

SEE ALSO: 5 Steps to Targeting Your Social Buyer

Focus On One Social Network

Fear of missing out may lead you to want to establish profiles on every network,  I suggest focusing on one social media channel. This tactic is especially useful for beginners. Focusing on one channel means gives you the time to gain a thorough understanding of the channel and post frequent updates without being too overwhelmed. The key here is to get a handle on the amount of time and energy you need to keep new posts flowing and maintain interaction with your audience.

Secondly, don’t simply choose a social network because it is the largest; choose one that fits your demographic best.  You want to meet your audience where they are. Choose the channel that will be effective for developing a relationship with your audience and meeting them for conversation.

SEE ALSO: How to Get Customers Using Social Media Monitoring

Focus on Using Great Visuals

Eye-catching visuals can easily set you up for success.  A photo or video versus a link or text update will increase your click-through-rate, and increase engagement. Time spent researching and brainstorming visual elements for your posts will be time well spent.

When people hear information, they’re likely to remember only 10% of that information three days later. However, if a relevant image is paired with that same information, people retained 65% of the information three days later.  (Source)

SEE ALSO: 6 Psychology Based Design Tips to Improve Engagement on Your Website

Focus on Welcoming New Followers

Focus on Landing Pages

I would also recommend having a landing page on your website optimized for visitors who come from social media. A useful tool for building landing pages is Leadpages. They offer easy to use templates with layouts that have been proven successful.

These are just a few tactics for success.  You will need to review your results and reconsider your strategy and tactics for social media over time.

Focus on Sharing Content

Content still rules. You will need interesting content to grab your audience’s attention and increase engagement. Consider setting up a feed or an alert so that you can find relevant content quickly.

Focus on Being Patient

It can take a while to see a return on your investment for social media. Don’t expect results overnight or even weeks. You may have to wait several months before meaningful results occur. As nice as it would be to get a viral post or video, don’t expect overnight success. Consistency will pay off. Stick to your schedule and strategy and the results will follow.

SEE ALSO: Top 7 Social Media Techniques For Any Branding Campaign

What You Should NOT Focus On…

In addition to the dos listed above, there are social media don’ts. If you want to maintain a positive reputation in the eyes of your audience, avoid these common pitfalls to protect your brand credibility.

Removing Negative Posts

In the age of screenshots, you don’t want to remove unfavorable posts unless necessary. Create content to change the narrative instead. If there is a situation where you must delete a post, the worst thing you can do is act like it did not happen. Just acknowledge it and move on as done in the example below.

Being A Robot

You don’t want to get into the habit of continuously using auto respond or automatic messages. Your audience wants to connect with you and experience the vitality of your brand. Consumers are increasingly savvy and will not interact with brands on autopilot.

Being Annoying

Don’t blatantly sell your product or service on your social network. It will bore your audience.

As mentioned, social media is a place where you build relationships with your audience. Use social media to ‘humanize’ your brand a personality and a voice. This is a key to winning at social media

SEE ALSO: How to Win at Social Media

Now that you’ve got your social media strategy in place, it’s time to get a handle on social media to avoid overwhelm.

Final Thoughts

While using these social media productivity hacks to enhance your digital brand requires a significant commitment of time and energy, you can maximize your time by putting your effort towards the activities that will achieve the best results. Ultimately, it boils down to being more social on social media. Avoid focusing solely on a paid strategy but put more effort into a relationship strategy. At the end of the day, you will increase brand reach and awareness if you make this simple adjustment.

Where do you focus your time on social media? Is there a particular area that is a time drain? Let me know in the comments.