This week we’re talking about all of the ways you can save time whilst managing your social media channels. In a busy industry it’s important you’re doing all that you can to grow your social media, without having to spend hours and hours on your phone. There are so many vital parts to running successful accounts and you need to be sure you’re able to them, without forgetting to engage with your followers too. Luckily, I have lots of tips and tricks to help you!
KEY TAKEAWAYS COVERED IN THE PODCAST
- LinkedIn, Instagram and Twitter are really good for interacting with personal and business accounts, especially if you own the account.
- The first thing you should do is think about the aims for your social media platforms. Are you trying to grow your following? Are you trying to connect with your audience? From there, you should think about your target audience. Chances are, this will be the same target audience that you have for your business.
- You should write down a list of keywords and hashtags that your customers are using. People often think that they should be using hashtags that show what you do, however, your customers won’t be looking at that. This will help you find your audience.
- It’s important to think about your competitors and places where you customers might be.
- When it comes to staying on top of your social media, you need to ensure you have content scheduled. Depending on how often you schedule your content, you need to ensure you’re checking within enough time.
- Liking and sharing other people’s content every single day is incredibly important. Using the hashtags you’ve collected, you’ll be able to find plenty of content to share. Have a number of posts in mind that you want to engage with and ensure you do it every day. This will help you reach out to your audience and people that may want to follow you.
- When engaging with other accounts, make sure your comments are meaningful.
- Occasionally, you might want to carry out an account clean up. This means getting rid of accounts that are no longer active or accounts that no longer align with your values.
- Every now and again, you may want to review your ‘About Me’ section and links.
THE ONE THING YOU NEED TO REMEMBER ABOVE ALL ELSE…
You need to check notifications at least three times a day, minimum. Make it part of your routine and you’ll soon get used to it.
HIGHLIGHTS YOU SIMPLY CAN'T MISS
- Which Platforms Are We Covering? – 05:15
- Where Should You Start? – 06:00
- Moving Forward with Your Accounts and Being Proactive – 09:00
Transcript below
Speaker 1: (00:33)
Hello and welcome to this week's episode of the podcast. I am so very grateful to have you here. How was your New Year and your Christmas break? Did you have a wonderful time and managed to get some rest? I did actually, which is fairly unusual if I'm honest. I don't often take a lot of time off but I'm not sure if it entirely helped this time because I felt like I took quite a bit of time off, tried to relax and then I really struggled getting back into it. So it's really interesting cause I thought it would make me really motivated to get going again but it didn't quite have that effect. So I am working super hard at the moment in terms of trying to get my motivation up and trying to get going. And it's hard sometimes when you work on your own and you work from home and that sort of thing.
Speaker 1: (01:15)
So I'm sure if you do those things then you can appreciate what I'm saying. Although I do actually love getting back into a routine. So I think once my daughter's back at school, which she's not yet, she will be soon because I'm recording this fairly early on in the year. I think I'll feel better then. So yeah, fingers crossed to that. Okay. Before we get on with today's episode, which I think you're going to really enjoy, cause we're talking about how to save time while managing social media, because honestly I know what it's like. It's such hard work. But before we get into that, I want to tell you something exciting because over on Instagram I am running a competition. So I want you to head up to Instagram and take a look at it. But basically what I'm doing is I'm giving away things that helped me in my business and help me be productive.
Speaker 1: (02:03)
So I'm giving away a wall planner that I designed. I'm giving away some notebooks that are really only for Academy members and pens that are only normally for Academy members. And then I'm also giving you some of my top business books that I've read that have made a big difference in my business. So I've got in there couple of Michael Hyatts books. So Here's Your Best Year Ever and Free to Focus. I'm also including Building A Story Around by Donald Miller and a couple of other books that should be cool and there's going to be other few little stationary bits and bobs in there which will just sort of fill it out and a few nice to have bits. But I wanted to start the year off with a bit of a giveaway just because like I said, I've used some of these things in order to help me in my business and I thought that it would be a great start for you guys.
Speaker 1: (02:52)
So it's all around the podcast. Basically what you have to do is head over to Instagram, check the posts that I've put up and on that post you have to tag in some friends who are going to maybe enjoy the podcast, might be interested in it, say some of your business friends maybe, and then you can share a post on stories or on your feed. And if you tag me in. Every time you do any one of these things you get ended to the competition so you have a chance to enter more than once. And like I said, I will pick one lucky winner out of a hat and they will get that bundle of marketing and business goodies in order to help their business drive forward this year and have an amazing 2020 because I think I've talked to a fair bit about the fact that this year I have really sort of, I don't want to say knuckle down cause I do every year, but I've really kind of focused this year on my goals and I've written them all out and I've made them S.M.A.R.T. So that they're specific and measurable and those sorts of things that go into the smart sort of acronym.
Speaker 1: (03:50)
And also I have made a real point of including some personal goals which I've never really done before. I've always done the kind of business only goals, but I'm really trying to focus on that as well this year. And I feel so positive about it. My word for the year, cause I also have a word for the year and I'd recommend that you guys do is action. So you want to be taking action as, or I want to be taking action as much as possible. So everything that I do, is it driving me forward? Is it helping me with those goals? Am I taking action daily in order to achieve those goals that I set out? So yeah, that's kind of where it's all going. So like I said, competition, go and enter it and then I will send this bundle of business goodies out to someone. So go and find all the details over on my Instagram.
Speaker 1: (04:37)
Just head over to Instagram and search Teresa Heath Wareing and you will find me. Okay. Let's get on with today's episode.
Which Platforms Are We Covering?
(04:45)
So this is something that I talk about a fair bit and I've realised I don't think I've really done an episode on it, but it's so important. I'm surprised I haven't as to date. This is all about how you manage your time using social media, how you make the most of all these platforms, however you don't spend hours on end on them and how you manage your time. So you can be really strategic without being kind of not doing the engagement bit. This is actually talking about how to do all the proactive stuff and it's something we do in the business all the time. So I want to talk to you about that and I want to talk you through our process that we use.
Speaker 1: (05:20)
So when I'm talking about this, I am mainly talking about LinkedIn, Instagram and Twitter only because they are really good for interacting and they're interacting off personal and or business accounts. Although LinkedIn you can't do this from a page. So these are really good when you are the person that is having that account and it's not necessarily the business account, although it's fine on Instagram and it's fine on Twitter. So before I get into the process, there's a couple of things that we do from a groundwork point of view that I would highly recommend you do because it's going to make a big difference when I'm talking to you about the proactive activity that you can do daily.
Where Should You Start?
So the very first thing I do is have a quick think about what are the aims for that platform? What am I trying to do on Twitter or what am I trying to do on Instagram?
Speaker 1: (06:07)
Am I trying to grow my following? Am I trying to connect with my audience? What am I trying to do in order to actually be running those in the first place? Then the next thing, and I just write a few words down, I don't write too much. And then the next thing I think about is who's the target audience of that platform? And basically this is your target audience for your business. So presumably the people you're trying to talk to on a social media platform are the same as the people you're trying to sell to and your business. So again, you should have this, if not, I will link in the show notes to the episode I did all about creating your avatar, your perfect customer avatar. So then what I do is I write down a list of keywords or hashtags. Now this is particularly appropriate for Instagram and Twitter and actually is becoming more appropriate for LinkedIn as they are using hashtags more recently.
Speaker 1: (06:56)
But what you're trying to do is you're trying to get a list of hashtags or keywords that your customers would use and this is often where people go wrong. They think to themselves that it's their hashtags. So for instance, if you are a carpenter you might hashtag carpenter, will be only people hashtagging there are carpenters. Whereas if your customer was a business owner that was a mum, then you might want to look at a hashtag like Mompreneur although saying that that's a very big hashtag and although we're not going to go into hashtag strategy today, maybe that's one for an episode. You don't want hashtags that are too big. You want to keep them as kind of medium range as possible. Cause if they're too big like Mompreneur, then you're never going to get found and you're going to struggle. But it might still work for the examples I'm going to give you today.
Speaker 1: (07:48)
But just bear that in mind if you're using it on your posts. So, like I said, write down a load of hashtags and a load of keywords that you can use to find your audience or your audience might use. And then the last bit of sort of grind work I do is I write down some competitors and I put them down not to necessarily go and steal their ideas or anything. I put them down because you'll see how we use competitors going forward. Not just necessarily competitors but places where your customers might be. So I always use the wedding example because it's an easy one to use. If you're a wedding photographer, then if you look at a wedding florist, then your customers are going to be there even though they're not a competitor to you. That's where your customers are also going to be.
Speaker 1: (08:33)
So try and think of the services and products that compliment you and what you do and then put them down in the competitor area as well. So like I said, so far you've written down some aims, you've written down the target audience, you've written down a list of keywords and hashtags and you've written down some competitors.
Moving Forward with Your Accounts and Being Proactive
So the next thing to do is to look at the proactive activities that you're going to want to do going forward for the your accounts. So what we do is we have a checklist and I'm going to give you the opportunity to get this checklist if you haven't already. Got it. If you head to the show notes for this episode. So teresaheathwareing.com/99 as in the numbers, not the words you're going to get the opportunity to download this checklist with all these details on.
Speaker 1: (09:18)
So you don't need to panic to write all these things down. But what we've done in the checklist is we have a list of activities and then we have daily every other day, weekly, monthly, and other. And then we have a section for notes. So we decide as we're going through these activities, how often we want to do them. And I'll explain to you what can impact on that really. So one of the first things we do is we check that we have content schedules. So if you're scheduling content, then obviously you're going to just want to give it a quick look to make sure you're scheduled ahead. So you've definitely got something coming out and depending on how often you schedule your content will depend on how often you want to pencil that in for. So for instance, if we do our content weekly, then every week we need to check we've got enough for the next week.
Speaker 1: (10:06)
Does that make sense? Hopefully it does. The next thing we have on our list is changing scheduling times. So that's to do with the content as well. So basically the scheduling times we will update every so often if we're using a scheduler, just because again, I try and keep it looking as natural as possible. I try and mix it up a little bit so that you know you haven't had your content going out on the same schedule for the past 12 months for instance. So again, that might be a quarterly thing or a monthly thing or an every other month thing. And like I said, you just go through and you tick which of these things, which box represents which ones? So I do, I check my content daily or weekly or monthly. Do I change the schedule weekly, monthly, quarterly. Then the next thing we've got on there, which actually we do three times a day as a minimum, is we check notifications.
Speaker 1: (10:57)
So we will literally schedule in our diaries because once we've done this, this all then gets translated to an online to do list. So literally first thing in the morning, middle of the day, last thing in the afternoon, we will go through and check the notifications. Now we have to do this because we have to be really strict with ourselves because you know what it's like when you're managing your own stuff. You literally sit there, you're working away, your phone pings, someone's done something on Instagram, you go to it, you start looking at it, and then you get tied into it and then you start looking through Instagram posts and stories and then you comment on someone's something and then basically you just spent the last 20 minutes messing around on Instagram just because you saw a notification. So what we try and do, and sometimes it's easier than others, I'm not going to pretend that we get it perfect every time, but we do schedule it in our calendars to check it.
Speaker 1: (11:47)
First thing, it's actually now part of my morning, my work morning routine, and then I check it middle of the day and then I check it later on. And for me, I'm happy to check my own stuff in the evening obviously. So, but we schedule those times in and those things you literally go in, look at, there's a notification if there is, you respond to that notification. So if someone's commented, you comment back. If they liked it, then we don't tend to do a whole lots of that. If they've shared them, we'll thank them, but we'll do the appropriate response immediately. And then the minute we've done the notifications would come out. We do nothing else because the other activities we're going to schedule in as well, but we don't need to be doing them every morning, every lunch time, every sort of afternoon and evening. So then the next type of things that we do is we like and share other people's content and this is where your hashtag keywords and competitors is going to come in really handy.
Speaker 1: (12:41)
So what we tend to do is, let's say we've got a list of 10 hashtags and we want to share and like people's content every day. Then we literally put it in our diary that every day we're going to run through one of these hashtags. So we might go in this morning and once we've done our notifications, we realise the next thing we need to do, because it's a daily activity, is go and like some people's posts or comment on their posts or retweet them or share them. Then what we might do is we'll give ourselves a number of times to do it. So for instance, if I want to comment on pictures on Instagram, I will put a list of, we need to comment on 10 pictures. We need to share three things or retweet three things. We need to like 15 posts. So I give myself a number and then I use one of those hashtags or keywords and I go and search for that.
Speaker 1: (13:37)
And then I go and do that within that hashtag. So I go and kind of like those posts or comment on those things. And the idea of this, the proactiveness in this is that you're trying to reach out to your audience. The same with the competitors. So if there are competitors or complementing services, then one of the things you might do is do the same sort of thing. Go to their account, look who they're following or who's following them and go and comment on their stuff or go and retweet their stuff as in the people who are following them, not the competitor themselves. So the idea is you're trying to outreach, you're trying to go out and go, look, I exist. Look here I am, but I want you to be really strategic and really kind of succinct in doing this. Like I said, this may not be a daily activity.
Speaker 1: (14:22)
This might be an every other day activity. This might be a weekly activity. If you've got a particularly busy account, you don't need to do it every day. If your account's quiet and new, then you probably want to be doing this as often as possible. But like I said, give yourself that limit. Say I'm going to comment on 10 pictures and then I'm coming off. So you literally go on, notification is check, check, check today's activities this go through today. I'm using this hashtag the next day, use the next hashtag. The next day use the next hashtag. So again, you're mixing that up as well and you'd go and comment on some pictures and make sure the comments are real and honest and true. So if I was doing this, I would honestly look for pictures that I think I love that or I agree with that or that's brilliant or whatever.
Speaker 1: (15:05)
So make sure that you're doing that with these things, not just like great post ever spammy type comments. So I would do those sorts of things and again, you decide am I doing them daily, every other day, weekly, whatever it might be. The other thing that you might need to do is follow new people. We all know that, especially on things like Twitter and Instagram followers or following people do help you build your followers. Now I don't want it to be spammy. I don't want you to do the follow on follow thing. But if you are following the correct type of people, then they might want to follow you back. So if you want to follow people then obviously this might be a good opportunity to do that. So again, it might be weekly, I'm going to follow 20 people and you will either find them by your competitors or your complementing services or by these keywords or hashtags.
Speaker 1: (15:53)
So again, we're using those to keep going back and finding people. The other thing that we have on our list is a account clener. So sometimes we will go through the account and we might do this monthly where we clean up any accounts that are dormant, inactive, not appropriate anymore and we'll just kind of unfollow or remove any accounts that aren't really suiting us at that time. Then we have things like adding people to a Twitter list if you have Twitter lists. I particularly really enjoy having a Twitter list. Don't really helps me. We have things like me just have a look at the Instagram on, liking other people's pictures and commenting on their pictures. The other thing we put in this list, because it's proactive stuff, is to review your actual about you information or your links on Instagram or review your kind of info in in Twitter because these things change and we don't look at them very often.
Speaker 1: (16:48)
And the other thing we have on here is proactive stuff is updating the cover photo. So that might go in as a quarterly activity. So like I said, you're going through and you're ticking off these different things and going, yes, I need to do that. I'm going to do that every other day. I'm going to do that once a week, and you're basically giving yourself a list of activities to do. Then once you've done those lists of activities, you're then going to put them in your diary, in your online to do list, whatever is you keep all you have because these activities are actually going to take very little time. So by the time that you go on to Instagram, put in the hashtag go down and five 15 pictures to comment on, you're probably going to be in there sort of 10-15 minutes tops, and then that's it.
Speaker 1: (17:30)
You're done for the day. You can just go and do your notification thing is normal. If you're scheduling is scheduling things out then great, but really you don't need to be spending hours just scrolling and scrolling aimlessly and I think that's the problem. I think that's where people feel like it takes up so much time because they're not being strategic. They're not thinking about what they're trying to do and also they're spending too long on that, so whereas if you know that tomorrow you're going to do re-tweeting 10 people, then you don't need to worry about that today because you know it's coming tomorrow, so I urge you to have a think about this and think about how you're managing that time because honestly you can do it a bit more strategically and saves some time in doing it. The other thing, like I said, what we try and do is we try not to look at stuff in between.
Speaker 1: (18:19)
Not always easy. Sometimes we do also when you go into your notifications and you comment on stuff or one of the activities of commenting on other pictures, you're obviously going to get notifications back from that, but I would definitely, definitely think about how you can structure that so that you're not sat on that platform all day. I try really hard not to be on the platforms because I do exactly the same as the rest of you. I will go on to do one thing. I get distracted by a post and before I know it, I've been in there 20 minutes and I can't remember what I was in there doing. So honestly I am totally with you in terms of managing this, which is why I had to set this up not only for me but also for the team as well. So do you go and download the checklist if you haven't already?
Speaker 1: (19:02)
Like I said, it's really useful. Really helps us kind of work out exactly what it is we're trying to do. Facebook is much harder to do this on because it's not as proactive. You can't reach out to your customers like you can on Twitter and Instagram and LinkedIn. But you know there's obviously the notification thing you'd definitely want to check. You definitely wanna keep an eye on your cover photos, infos about you and those kind of more wider things. But hopefully that's helped you kind of just get in your head, How you can try and keep that stuff to an absolute minimum. So I'm going to leave it there because it's a bit short and sweet that one. But hopefully it's going to help you manage your time because this is another key area for me this year that I'm not going to waste my time because I do have a habit of doing that.
Speaker 1: (19:49)
So really proactive, really on the ball. She says, let me see how I go on. We'll see how that goes. Anyway, next week is episode 100. Yes, which is so exciting and another reason why I've done the competition because it to celebrate the hundredth episode as well and its a surprise episode. It's a bit different what we normally do and I am really excited/nervous about it cause it's not yet being recorded and it's not getting recorded until really close to the hundred episodes. So I can't wait for you guys to hear it and see what you think. It's going to be interesting. It's either going to go one way or the other. So anyway, I'm going to leave you guys to it. Hopefully that's helpful this week and as always, if you've got anything you want me to help you with, if you've got any suggestions for upcoming episodes and please do reach out. I love to hear from you. All right guys, have a wonderful week and I will see soon.
