We all know how important it is to get involved with social media as a small business (quite frankly if you’re not on social media you’re missing out on huge potential benefits), but at the same time we all wish it took less time and was more effective.
Well today I’m going to share my top tips, tricks and resources that you can implement in less than half an hour which will save you time, and allow you to use social media more effectively to achieve your business goals.
To achieve your goals more efficiently you need to plan your time, and track your goals and what is and isn’t successful.
Luckily for us there are a number of social media tools designed to help us do just that.
7 quick & awesome (free) social media tools you can implement today to save you time
Triberr – blog amplification
Triberr is great for helping you to find quality content to share across your networks, and is a great way of connecting with other bloggers and business people.
Buffer – social media scheduling tool
Buffer is a life saver when it comes to making sure you’re posting regularly. It allows you to schedule your posts across Facebook, twitter and LinkedIn really easily and has useful analytics built in showing you how successful your posts were.
Bitly – URL shortening and bookmarking
Bit.ly is a free link shortening service which comes with fantastic analytics (much better and easier to manage to goo.gl or Hootsuite in my opinion).
Hootsuite – Social Media Management dashboad
Hootsuite is my favourite dashboard for browsing through all my social media accounts. It also has a scheduling feature, and a link shortening feature but I think they fall short of bit.ly and buffer.
Just Retweet – Content amplification
Just Retweet is a great site for helping you to grow your social reach, especially on Twitter. It gives you access to quality content, and puts your content in front of other bloggers looking specifically to share it by retweeting you (as opposed to Triberr shares which are all mentions).
Link Tally – social share stats
Linktally.com is a free resource provided by the wonderful folk at Hubspot. It’s a great way of seeing how many people have shared your content from your site.
Topsy Trackback – find who’s mentioned your blog on twitter
If you’re looking to connect with the people who are interacting with your content without necessarily mentioning you then Topsy Trackback is the place to look.
Knowing what you’re aiming to achieve
The number one thing to do to make your time on social media for your business more efficient is to know what the hell you want to get out of it. Unless you have a goal, you can’t be strategic about achieving it because you’ll be spending your time aimlessly.
The 3 aims of social media and how to achieve them more efficiently
There are 3 different business goals that you might want to use social media to help you achieve:
SEO
If you’re using social media primarily to help your SEO then you need to make sure that you’re using your keywords in your bios, and talking about that topic regularly. You also want to be getting as many relevant new followers and interactions as possible.
Leads & Sales
If you want to use social media as an additional area to be generating leads and sales then you want to focus on getting new contacts, and making as many new interactions as possible.
Building authority (inbound marketing)
If you want to use social media to build your authority as an expert in your field then you want to look at getting more shares of your posts and articles, and interacting with other key influencers in your industry.
Get tracking
There are a number of free tools which will help you to track what’s going on in your social media (including Google Analytics of course), but they all only go so far. The best way to keep track of what you’re interested in is to draw up a simple spreadsheet so you can compare the figures you’re interested in directly.
Like our tips? Subscribe to our small business and entrepreneur advice blog
Our blog is full of great tips on design and marketing to help you learn how to become a more successful and knowledgeable business owner. Click here to subscribe.
