One of the major challenges I face in my business is that I need to be in so many places at once, not only in the real world where my boys want to hit the beach and my clients want me in the office but in the virtual world as well.
Online, I have multiple accounts for both my business and personal use. I know that many of you as business owners also have your business represented on more than one social media platform. Talk about needing to be everywhere at once! The more you are on, the more difficult it becomes to manage, right?
Well, not necessarily. There are some cool tricks that can seriously make your life easier when it comes to managing multiple social media platforms. I am going to share with you some of my best secrets on how I manage the following social media accounts for Online Social Butterfly.
- You need a strategy. I cannot stress enough how important it is to have marketing strategy. This does not have to be a complicated document but it needs to provide you with a rough plan on what you are focusing on in your business. I break mine down for 12 months and work back, meaning I have annual, monthly, weekly strategies.
- You need to be organised. There is simply no time to be faffing about every day trying to imagine what to post across a lot of platforms. Being organised takes on several major activities but mostly it involves having a monthly plan for my accounts.
- Get comfortable with scheduling. There is simply no way around it. If you want to be managing multiple accounts, you need to learn the art of scheduling. There are scheduling options for almost all social media platforms. Some are free and some are paid. I use a combination of free and paid services in my business. My personal favourites are:
- Hootsuite: this allows you to schedule posts to Google+, LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. It also allows you to do bulk uploads.
- Schedugram: If you are using Instagram in your business, then you need to purchase this. Schedugram is available for a monthly service fee of around $30 but it works brilliantly.
- Facebook: despite being able to use Hootsuite to schedule posts in to Facebook, I do not recommend this. Facebook has its own scheduling feature and it is well-known that they will penalise your posts if they come from outside the Facebook platform. If you don’t know how to schedule posts, this blog shows you how. http://bit.ly/FacebookSchedulePost For Facebook, I create all of my posts in a Word document and then copy and paste them in bulk once a month. If you fancy doing this, then grab a copy of my planner here for only $33 http://bit.ly/2015FBPlanner
- Have lots of images ready to go. It is important that your posts contain images and some platforms (think Instagram and Pinterest) reply heavily on images so you need to have these done before you start planning or scheduling. I personally LOVE Canva. It is a free website that allows you to create your own images.
I sincerely hope you have enjoyed learning some of the insider secrets in this blog. Please be sure to give some a try and see how you get on.