Social Media and Your Business

It can be hard for busy business owners to keep up with social media. These tips will help you balance your schedule and market your small business.

Every second, about 6,000 tweets are sent. Users upload around 800 photos on Instagram. Five new profiles are added on Facebook. Life on the internet moves fast, and if you spend your days meeting with potential clients, gutting out old floors for a remodel or driving to and from jobsites, it’s pretty hard to keep up with all of it.

Of course, most small business owners don’t have time to spend trawling the web for new content ideas. After all, most days there’s barely enough time to grab lunch when you’ve got a day full of window replacements to get to.

But keeping up a lively and active social media feed doesn’t have to mean hours languishing at your laptop. With some simple adjustments, you can bolster your engagement, land more project leads and keep yourself stocked with relevant posts—without a hefty time commitment on your part. Here’s how.

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1. Stay Ahead of the Game

The best strategists know that planning makes all the difference. That means both developing a social media plan, which we’ll talk about below, and having a fallback when spare time is harder to come by. Social media scheduling apps like Buffer or Amplifr connect to all your social media accounts, allowing you to designate posts for future dates. That should save you some time next time you’re double-booked for a job.

2. Become a Curator

The share button is there for a reason, and you shouldn’t be afraid to use it. Retweeting or sharing posts lets you quickly bulk up your feed without a lot of effort.

Of course, there’s an art to this, too. Exclusively sharing content can reflect badly on your business’s social media reputation. The code of conduct on social media platforms is much like a potluck this way—it’s not polite to fix yourself a heaping plate without bringing something to the table. If you’re constantly retweeting or sharing others’ content, it can appear as though you’re not contributing any of your own finds. Most content experts advise aiming for an 80/20 breakdown of sharing versus original posts, which is a pretty doable ratio.

3. Take Five

You can put off posting occasionally as needed, but delayed customer responses can have some serious repercussions. Take a few moments each day to triage customer complaints and engage with users who connect with you over social media. Usually these responses will be less time-consuming if you wait until after peak engagement periods have passed (early in the morning, for instance, is a great time to respond because you likely won’t get pulled into a prolonged back-and-forth).

Never contradict an angry or frustrated customer. On the contrary, be sure to thank them for their insight and offer to make it right. Even if you disagree with them, it will defuse the situation and save you time—which is a much more precious resource than your ego.

4. Harness the Power of Automation

In addition to social media scheduling, you can use a little creative computing to help get more content to your feed. IFTTT, short for “if this, then that,” is an automation “applet” that integrates with social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. You can use it to program your own automated “rules” for your applications—like say, to schedule a link to be posted every time you favorite it as you browse. That way, you can build up your stockpile of content fast without a lot of manual effort.

5. Don’t Disregard Analytics

It’s hard to stay motivated to post if no one seems to be paying attention. Many scheduling apps also contain analytics reports, which you can use to review each post’s success rate and see what kind of content your audience responds to.

The recipe of what makes a successful post is a bit mercurial even for the best social media users—but when your time is limited, you want to make the most of the posts you do put up. Pull reports on engagement, clicks, likes, and shares at least once a month. Review this information to see what brings your followers out of the woodwork and develop a plan to integrate the kind of content your users tend to respond to—while holding true to your brand tone and company values.

6. Hire Someone

If all else fails and you find yourself constantly struggling to keep up with customers and refresh your feed, it may be time to engage some outside help. There are hundreds of social media professionals who would be eager to take on a part-time gig managing your feed.

Depending on the results you’re looking for, you can also turn the work over to a marketing firm. These teams can help you leverage social media advertising and provide experience a freelance consultant may or may not have. But it comes at a price. You can expect to spend $1,000 or more for the agency treatment.

All in all, there’s no shame in asking for outside help. After all, it just means you’re growing, and that’s a good thing!

Erin Vaughan is a blogger, gardener and aspiring homeowner. She currently resides in Austin, Texas, where she writes full time for Modernize, with the goal of empowering homeowners with the expert guidance and educational tools they need to take on big home projects with confidence.