Social media marketing is a time-consuming process no matter what industry you’re in. It’s no longer just a matter of sharing great content; you have to spend time engaging with your followers, monitoring and analyzing your activity and optimizing paid advertising campaigns. It should be a daily effort—but who really has the time to dedicate to social every day? I know I don’t, but I use tools that make my daily efforts reasonable, efficient and successful.

These three tips will streamline your efforts and significantly cut down the time you spend on your social marketing:

Share content that you already know is trending in your industry

There is nothing more time consuming than manually seeking out content on search engines and playing a guessing game when deciding what types of content to share for your followers. Luckily, there is an extremely helpful tool that I use called Topsy that allows me to search for an industry term and all trending social content comes up based around that topic. This cuts out the guessing game of wondering, “are my followers going to care about this?”, because the software provides you with the topics and articles that people are already buzzing about. If it’s already trending, your followers will most likely care, too, and are more likely to engage or share your content.

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Maximize exposure by seeking out engagement with influencers 

Make the most of out of your engagement efforts by determining your top influencers on Twitter and spending the time you do have for engagement with reaching out to those who have the most potential of stretching your content. Tools like Followerwonk analyze your Twitter followers and rank them based on amount of followers, length of time they’ve had an active Twitter account, how often they tweet and what their social authority is. You can sort and export the data, too, so you can keep track of engagement efforts with each user. Of course—ALL of your followers matter, so don’t forget about the little guys, too, just make sure that proactively reaching out to influencers is a part of your strategy.

Create a content calendar in advance 

Instead of searching for articles and logging into your accounts each time you want to share a post, consider streamlining your efforts by compiling all of your content into a weekly, bi-weekly or monthly schedule (depending on the nature of your content). News articles should be timely, but other content types such as product or service spotlights, blog showcases or employee photos, to name a few, can be scheduled way in advance. Organizing and scheduling all of your content at once will allow you to have more time to be social with your followers and seek out new ones on the daily.

Fortunately, there are thousands of software programs out there that can speed up your social media marketing efforts. HubSpot is one of our favorites. If you’re interested in learning more about how HubSpot can help streamline your social media efforts – click below!

Is there a must-have tool that your company swears by for social media? If so, feel free to let us know in the comments below!
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