automate

Are you a social media master? Do you spend hours creating a powerful intro, put together the perfect plan, and then post at exactly the right time? Have you conquered Facebook, brought Twitter to your heel, and gotten LinkedIn under control?

At RBC, we live, breathe, and eat social media (yes, our meals are mostly differing shades of blue logos…) And we know that one thing business owners don’t have much (read “any”) of, is spare time. So, here’s a super simple guide on mastering your social media marketing in less time than it takes to cook a delicious Facebook soufflé.

Plan your social media ahead of time. At the start of the month, you’re going to plan what you’re going to promote on social media. Look, we know it’s more fun to wing it, but trust us on this. Look through all of the content you have — Blog posts, articles, videos, image galleries — All those things you’ve put time, effort and a little love into creating. Decide on the marketing themes for each part of the month, and the main points you want to get across.

Put together a social media calendar. Once you know what you’re going to promote, you need to work out the when and how. That means you need a social media calendar. On each day plan out:

• What you want to promote.
• How you’re going to promote it.
• The channel(s) you want to use.

The trick is to strike a balance between posting enough to build momentum, and not posting so much you’re over saturating. The best way to do this is to post your own stuff and also share other useful articles, links, and content from others. That could be through retweeting, sharing, repinning, etc.

Write your social media posts.This one is key — Write your social media posts ahead of time. You can be much more consistent, use similar language, and get into the right mindset to get all the important information across. Remember to slightly repurpose your posts for the social media network you’re using. Your LinkedIn posts are probably going to be a bit more formal than your Facebook ones. Twitter means you’ll need to limit yourself to 140 characters.

Automate your social media posts. You don’t want to sit at the computer waiting for a specific time to post your content. Use an automation suite like Buffer or Hootsuite to automate your social media for you. Now, you shouldn’t completely rely on automation, so switch it up with some personally curated and posted updates as well. Engage people in conversation, and help others feel involved. Make sure you respond to @mentions properly.

Track your social media results. You’ll want to know where you’re getting the most visibility and traction. This means looking at when visitors are coming to your website and responding to your social media marketing. Use Google Analytics and similar tools to see what’s working for your audience, and tweak your marketing approach.

Get a social media expert to help you out. This probably doesn’t come as a surprise, but here at RBC, we’re experts at this stuff. If you don’t have the time, let us do the hard work for you. We’ll audit all your content, put together the perfect social media calendar, promote the heck out of your products and services, and get lots of lovely visitors over to your website.