How often do you tell yourself that this is the month you’ll start posting consistently on social media?

You start the month strong, but life gets busy, and things slip in week two. Then oops – there’s a snap lockdown, and your whole plan goes right out the window.

Hey, there’s always next month, right?

If you find it hard to stay on top of your socials from week to week, it’s time to solve the problem once and for all by getting ahead of the game.

In this article, I’ll share my top tips and tools of the trade to help you give your socials a head start.

HOW TO STAY ON TOP OF YOUR SOCIALS ONCE AND FOR ALL!

Get Strategic

If your social strategy is to “wing it” by coming up with your content as you’re posting it (which is only when you happen to have time), you’re not going to see a significant ROI from your social marketing.

The key to success with your socials is consistency. A couple of posts a week over six months is far more effective than posting daily for two weeks and nothing next month.

The best way to ensure you’re consistent is to be strategic. Set aside an hour or two every few months to plan your content.

Include important dates or events that might be relevant to your business. Decide which platforms you want to post on, how often, and what type of content you’ll create.

Your strategy can be as simple or as detailed as you want, but the more detail you put in during your planning session, the less work you’ll have to do during the month. This means you’ve got a comfortable buffer zone to ensure the socials keep flowing even when you’re busy doing something else.

Create A Content Schedule

Once you’ve got your strategy sorted, it’s time to get down to the nitty-gritty planning stages of plugging that valuable content into your schedule.

Choose the best dates and times to post to your platforms, and include as much information as possible, such as hashtags to include, videos or photos you’ve chosen, and even pre-written captions.

When it comes time to post, the hard work is already done - all you have to do is put the information on the relevant platform.

If you want to free up your time even more, use a scheduling app such as Later or HootSuite to post your content for you automatically.

And that leads us nicely to my next juicy tip…

Embrace Technology

The online world is a wonderful, magical place. For almost any problem you can think of, there’s an app to help solve it.

Don’t be afraid to invest in and leverage technology to boost your efficiency and productivity. From finding the best hashtags and knowing the optimal time to schedule to creating posts and engaging with your followers – there’s a tech solution for it all!

Here’s a shortlist of the best to get you started:

●        Biteable – takes the stress out of creating engaging short videos for your socials. Loads of free templates, footage, music and animated scenes to help you make quality content.

●        Buzzsumo – get inspiration for the kind of content to post with this research tool. Helps you research keywords and trending topics, track competitors, and find influencers to connect with in specific niches.

●        Missinglettr – scrapes your blog post content to create social content. Also has analytics features, templates, and scheduling capabilities.

●        Hootsuite – brings all your socials together in one place, helping you streamline your management. Includes social calendars, in-depth analytics and more.

●        Mention – detects and tracks mentions of your brand, products or competitors in real-time and allows you to respond from within the platform.

●        Bitly – shrinks your URLs down into smaller, easier to remember ones. Also offers some handy analytic tools.

●        Canva – supports you to create quality visual content with thousands of templates for each social channel and more than a million stock images.

Use Templates

Want to level up your branding? Create and use templates for your content. For example, instead of editing each photo to your style, create your own presets, have a graphic designer create sme brand specific templates, or hunt out templates online.

Store your templates for different types of content in a library for easy access.

A great place to start is Canva. It is a free resource that allows you to create branded visual elements, then tweak them for individual posts.

Clear Away The Clutter

Strengthen your brand and engagement by making sure you’re only following accounts that are relevant to you and your business.

Instead of manually going through each one, you can use a tool like Crowdfireapp to clear out inactive accounts (or those who don’t follow you back).

Set Boundaries When Using Your Socials

Social media platforms are designed to be addictive; that’s what makes them so effective! However, that can be a bad thing when you jump on intending to engage with your audience and end up spending an hour mindlessly scrolling through reels.

Make your social usage intentional by setting boundaries on how you spend your time online. Before you open Facebook or Instagram, be clear on why you’re logging in. Do you want to post something new, answer some messages, or comment on some relevant pages?

Random browsing and scrolling can be productive, but make sure you put a time limit on your session: set an alarm and get back to the real world when your time’s up!

Still need a bit more help getting on top of your socials? Then let’s chat! I help businesses get intentional with posting on their socials with clear goals and strategies to support them. Book a time to speak with me now.