You might have accounts for your retail business on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter and Pinterest – all the biggest players. But do you have enough hours in the day to maintain them while also engaging with your followers? We reveal some quick and easy hacks that you can implement whenever you have a few minutes to spare. The result? A great social media presence, meaning more customers through your doors.
- Prioritise the right platforms
There are millions of social media users online right now. So with so many potential customers, that makes your life much easier, right? Not unless you leverage your best tools and discard the rest.
By devoting your time to too many social platforms, you’re actually limiting yourself. If you have half an hour free each night, for example, you’ll only have enough time to make updates on a couple of platforms, and may not be able to interact with any of your followers.
Experts recommend focusing your time on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn – but if that’s stretching your capacity, pick the two platforms that work best in terms of customer engagement and stick with those.
- Get the right technologies to help
If you’re already comfortable with social media management, you probably have a set time each day to manage your account. That’s great! But don’t get caught in the snowball effect of having to check your phone every hour – or more! – to see if people are commenting.
Technology tools like Hootsuite can actually let you manage all your social media accounts from a single location. It’ll save you time and mean you can check everything in a matter of minutes – rather than multiple times spread out across the day.
Other online tools like rostering software can help with the time-intensive daily tasks so you can use that free time for social media marketing efforts.
- Research your target market for clear tactics
It’s a good idea to narrow down your target market and understand exactly who they are. That way, you’ll have a better idea of their engagement levels on social media, and you’ll know what they want to see in their feeds.
Ask the following questions (adjusted to your particular business):
- Does my target market prefer in-store or online shopping?
- What’s their social media routine – more views/comments/shares during the evening, for example?
- How receptive are they to giveaways and share contests on social platforms?
- Do you get more success from posts in the morning, middle of the day or night?
- Batch and schedule your posts
For business owners who want to post regularly on social media that might mean spending an allotted amount of time every day creating posts. And that time really adds up.
TIP: frequent posting is a great way to build a consistent experience for your followers
To save time, consider batching and scheduling your posts. That means taking one day every week to pool all your content, all your updates and all your giveaways into a spreadsheet.
From there you can either copy and paste the posts directly into your chosen platform on the preferred date. You can also check out cloud-based sheets like smartsheet which is a great way to manage your social media calendar.
- Use popular platforms to find content that can go viral
While ‘viral content’ might not be the first thing you think of when you think ‘retail’, it’s actually a good way of reaching new audiences and showing your lighter side.
Finding viral content doesn’t take long. Just check out BuzzSumo, type in a keyword that’s relevant to your business and see what returns. You’ll get data on the most shared posts with that keyword over the past year, which you can then include in your content calendar.
Getting your marketing sorted fast isn’t always easy, but with these tips you’ll save time – and money – to focus on the most important parts of your business.
