If not well managed, social media can be very time-consuming. Even if your college or university is active on a limited number of social media platforms, building and maintaining the necessary community can easily take several hours out of your week, thus becoming more of an obstacle than an asset to your overall social campaign. As a marketing professional in higher education marketing, your sanity depends on efficiently managing your social media presence. Here are 5 time-saving social media tips to help you share content smoothly.
1. Define a Clear Social Media Strategy for Social Media Management
Being active on social media does not require you to activate 20 different accounts across various platforms. If you are just getting started or have not ventured beyond Facebook and Twitter, venture off slowly and give yourself time to develop the best practices on each of your chosen platforms. To start, take the time to:
- Focus on 3 or 4 relevant platforms where you know your students are
- Create a spreadsheet of all the accounts, complete with the usernames and passwords, so the information is easily retrievable for you and any other participating team members.
- Integrate social media to your content strategy: It all starts with content, specifically the high-quality content your school needs to create to build traction. Creating a content calendar for your college’s blog is a great way to generate blog posts efficiently. It will also help you determine the key messages and monthly themes of your social media activities.
- Determine a sharing path: what happens to your content after you publish it on your school’s blog? Will you share it on Facebook and Twitter automatically? Will you share only a link and a photo on Google+? Determining this in advance will save you a lot of time.
- Determine a social media schedule and treat it like a business appointment.
2. Make Your Content Social to Maintain Content Strategy for Colleges
Beyond excellent quality, a solid social media strategy depends on content that is easy to share. Make your college’s site social by adding a few social plug-ins to your pages, allowing them to share posts with a button click. Making your site social also means your web content must be visible from mobile devices. Be sensitive to format when creating content. Responsive web design (link) lets visitors share your content easily via smartphones or tablets.
3. Organize Your Followers
To use social media tools for education, create lists on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ circles to make it easier to follow some conversations and to make your messaging as tailored as possible to these different groups.
4. Manage Notifications Tightly
A considerable part of social media management your audiences don’t see is the notifications sent to your inbox. As you activate more social media accounts, the number of notifications will follow suit, and nothing says disruption like a poorly selected set of notifications! Set up your customized notifications in ways that make sense for you and your schedule. Only use notifications if you are not regularly on a platform or if you rely on them for reminders.
5. Consolidate Your Accounts With Social Media Management Tools
- Hootsuite allows you to schedule posts or auto-schedule them when your community is most active on the most popular platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Google+). Its Hootlet feature lets you directly share any content you may read with your audience. Hootsuite is also great for monitoring what is happening on various social media platforms.
- Instagram can be used as a management tool for all your photos. Indeed, this tool allows you to upload all photos to FB, Flickr, Twitter, Tumblr, etc.
- Selective Tweet is a great tool to avoid automatic updates on Facebook and Twitter. Many colleges without the resources to create enough content decide to populate their Twitter feed directly from their Facebook updates and vice versa. Consequently, they share the same content on all platforms, which is detrimental to the incentive to follow the school on other social media platforms. The Selective Tweet application is the perfect tool to differentiate the content on your Facebook and Twitter feeds. This tool lets you pick tweets you want to share on Facebook by adding the hashtag #fb to your tweets.
In a nutshell, How can I save time on social media? Define a Clear Social Media Strategy, Make Your Content Social, Organize Your Followers, Manage Notifications Tightly and Consolidate Your Accounts With Social Media Management Tools.
Here are other tips to manage social media efforts.
What time-saving tactics and tools have you been using?
FAQ To Consider
How can I save time on social media?
Define a Clear Social Media Strategy, Make Your Content Social, Organize Your Followers, Manage Notifications Tightly and Consolidate Your Accounts With Social Media Management Tools.
