What if I told you that you could save hours of time on social media each week?
We all know how important it is to be active on social media to build our brands, network, promote our products and services and general send traffic to our websites but what nobody seems to talk about is just how time-consuming it all is.
I could easily spend all day, every day on social media (and that doesn’t include the time I spend watching Reels of cute dogs!)
When I first started my online business I would spend 10-12 hours each week scheduling social media posts. Every Sunday I would put on a film (or 2 or 3!), sit down on the couch and schedule my social media posts for the week ahead. With around 4 Instagram posts, 2 Facebook Group posts and 4 updates on my Facebook page each day, I would easily spend 3-5 hours on this.
Then came Pinterest. When I was pinning things manually, I would spend at least an hour every day on Pinterest.
Add networking, replying to comments, taking part in sharing/promo threads into the mix and most of my time was being spent on social media.
Whilst what I was doing was time-consuming, it was working. My traffic from social media was growing daily, my email list was growing each week and I was making more and more sales/getting more and more new inquiries. But maintaining that level of week each week was impossible so I set out to find ways to save time!
Today I’m going to share my top time-saving tips with you.
1. PLAN YOUR CONTENT AHEAD OF TIME
One of the main things that helps me save time scheduling social media is knowing exactly what I’m going to be posting.
There’s nothing like a last-minute blind panic to slow you down. Trust me, when you rush, you make mistakes and everything takes twice as long! Planning ahead also means that you can batch tasks which saves more time.
Knowing what you’re going to publish and when, on your blog might not seem like it’s going to save you any time when it comes to social media but anything that helps you get organised and plan ahead is going to seriously cut down on the time content creation takes.
The same goes for promotions so plan out any launches, flash sales, affiliate promos, etc. out for the week or even the month ahead of time.
2. USE TEMPLATES FOR IMAGES
If you’re looking for a way to significantly save time when it comes to creating and scheduling social media content, templates are it!
Every social media platform requires different dimensions for graphics and you’ll usually want to create multiple variations for each platform. This means for each blog post, freebie, service, course…whatever you’re promoting, you could be creating around 10 different images/graphics.
That’s a lot of images and it could take you hourssssss to create them all. But, because I use templates, it takes me about 20 minutes to create them all.
I’ll be completely honest, it took me a few hours to create all of the templates initially but now that I have them, they save me loads of time in the long-run. Now each time I need to create new graphics for a blog post, I just have to log into my Canva account, make a copy of the templates and update them! Simple!
If you are looking for some Pin Templates to use and reuse I have some free ones here!
3. USE A SCHEDULING TOOL THAT HAS AN EVERGREEN FEATURE
Scheduling your social media posts ahead of time will allow you to batch the content creation which will save you time in the long run but I really want to talk about creating and scheduling evergreen content as it’s been a complete gamechanger for me!
There are a few social media scheduling tools that offer this but my absolute favourite is SmarterQueue.
We all know how quickly social media newsfeeds move and, as a result, how important it is to share your content multiple times and consistently.
With SmarterQueue you can write a post once and select “Re-Queue After Posting” - this will loop your post over and over again. No need to rewrite your post each time you want to share it!
You can even choose how long you want between the posts, you can choose a set number of times that post is shared or a select a date after which the post expires. How cool is that?
Once your posts are in the evergreen queue, you just need to add new content for time-sensitive things such as launches and flash sales and add new evergreen posts when you create new content, or launch a new product or service.
Again, this is one of those things that can take a bit of time to get set up, especially if you have lots of content and products that you need to create evergreen content for already, but it’s a one-and-done thing and saves a SERIOUS amount of time each week.
If you want to see what all the fuss is about, I have an affiliate link. By going through this you get a 30 day free trial instead of 14 and I get a small percent of your monthly cost - at no extra cost to you - win win!
WANT TO SAVE EVEN MORE TIME? HIRE HELP!
This tips will help you save hours each week but if you’re looking to save even more time, outsourcing your social media content creation and scheduling might just be the answer you’re looking for.
I offer social media packages and Pinterest packages. For more information check this out
