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How can you maximize your social media activity on a minimal time commitment?
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As with all things, social media management is what you make of it. Small business owners are always looking to strike the right balance between marketing their products or services and actually running their business. Because of this business struggle of not knowing what should be top priority, business owners are often hesitant to jump into social media because of the preconception that maintaining a social media presence online can be time consuming. Which is why most people will initially avoid it, because who has the time to spend tweeting and Facebooking when they are trying to run a business? But having the right knowledge and tools at your disposal can make all the difference in the world, and part of that is knowing when and how often to post to these social media channels.
To stay as specific as possible, I am going to narrow my tips to Twitter and Facebook because they are the most popularly used across multiple industries and the easiest to use for those just starting out.
Deciding How Often to Post
For Twitter, the research says that you should shoot for at least 5 tweets per day. This research can be a great starting point, but you should monitor your own results as you progress in engagement. Each market is different and they expect different things from different brands and services.
For Facebook, research says that the most successful brands post just once per day. But you should keep in mind that bigger business have a better chance at being noticed on Facebook user's home feeds. This shouldn't keep you from using Facebook because of the notion of competing with bigger brands. Facebook can still be useful to small businesses even though the engagement rate drops off after the first post is seen. In order to keep up, research suggests smaller brands should probably post on average 5 times per day on Facebook as well. Keep in mind this is just research to get you started. You will need to monitor and track your engagements in order to create a schedule catered to your own company's market.
Optimal Time for Posts
Twitter: Research says that the optimal time for tweets are at 12pm and 6pm because they have the higher click rate. But the posts at 5pm get the most retweets.
Facebook: Optimal time for shared posts are at 1pm, but the mosts clicks are for posts at 3pm.
Utilizing the Available Tools
You can save even more time by scheduling your posts in advance. Facebook already has this capability built in which allows you to create posts and schedule them for a specific day and time in the future. There are also other social media automation tools available for business owners. We even have our own at LunaSoft that we built on our platform for our own use which is now available for our clients to use as well. It allows us to monitor our social media engagements and also create and schedule all of our posts.
With a social media management tool, you could potentially spend only one day a week on your social media creating and scheduling posts for the entire week. This will really free up all that time you need to actually run your business. This way all your social media is already taken care of and you don't need to worry about getting to a computer all day.
To wrap it up, it's important that the research should only be your starting point. Even with utilizing the social media management tools out there, its important to first find what works for you and your customers. Monitor your own results and then tailor it to what will fit the best for what you are looking for.
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