How many hours do you spend every week on social media for your network marketing business? Most professionals have found that the sweet spot is anywhere from 10 to 15 hours a week – but this ranges greatly from one brand to another. If you have a grassroots direct sales business and are trying to get started from the ground up, you may feel like engaging on Facebook and Twitter alone is an all-day event.
Who has time for that? We certainly don’t!
Is social media really worth neglecting other areas of your business?
Thankfully, it doesn’t have to come down to that. We have developed an extremely effective method of streamlining your social media efforts and boosting your productivity. Here are our secrets:
1. Get in the right frame of mind.
You can’t save time, so start focusing on how to best spend your time. Check out our Tao of YOU post to learn more!
2. Find your Prime Time
Post smarter, not harder!
What hours of the day is your niche market the most active? Knowing when to be present will help you maximize your effectiveness and reach the widest audience. There are 2 very helpful (and completely free) tools that will give you insight on your customers’ online habits.
Facebook has made it so easy for you to research what times your audience is most active, which posts are getting the most clicks and engagement, and how many people you’re reaching.
Like Facebook Insights, Tweriod is a free service that analyzes your Twitter account and then tells you the best times to tweet and try to connect with your followers.
Most businesses find that the ideal times to be social are in the late afternoon (2-5pm) and in the evening (6-8pm). But your audience may be different! Do your research and make sure you’re getting social during the peak hours.
Try to set aside at least 2 hours each day during those times to replay, comment, engage, and share. This should be authentic conversation with your customers, fans, followers, and other networkers in your industry. Answer questions, thank fans for sharing and liking, comment on another marketer’s Facebook post, retweet great advice from a direct sales expert.
JOIN IN THE VIRTUAL CONVERSATION!
3. Automate Your Efforts
Beyond all of the valuable and personal engagement that builds your authority, you still need to be regularly posting fresh content, sharing valuable news stories in your industry, finding who to follow on Twitter, and more. You need to build an entire cross-platform social marketing campaign where all of your social channels are aligned and integrated.
This is far too much to handle manually! You need Social Media Automation Tools to maximize your time and help you use your hours more efficiently.
Here are a few of our favorites:
The free version of Buffer connects up to 4 of your social media sites (you can upgrade to integrate more accounts with the paid version). Schedule posts to go live at a particular day and time, and choose if and when to repeat (or “buffer”) certain posts and tweets.
HootSuite has all the perks of Buffer, but you can also monitor each social media site in real-time from the HootSuite dashboard. Monitor, reply, post and schedule everything you need across all of your platforms from one location. All you have to do is highlight text, right click and select the HootSuite logo, and then schedule when the content will go live.
Sometimes you need to take a break from writing your own killer content and share what’s already trending. Swayy is a content curation tool that helps you fill the gap between creating original content and still keeping your audience engaged and interested. You can connect your accounts and start browsing through popular posts and sites your customers will find interesting. Swayy also includes great analytics data and graphs to help you learn more about your customers.
This tool reveals the influencers in your field, rates their level of influence (Klout Score) and allows you to follow/unfollow anyone relevant/irrelevant. It also lets you analyze anyone’s followers (e.g. competitors) to give you a better view of what’s going on in your circles (or potential circles).
Klout is another content curation site, but it also allows you to share your own content. This helps measure your own Klout score, which a lot of people (search engines included) are using to determine authority. There are analytics so you can track and measure your posting, as well as helpful suggestions, such as people to share with/mention etc.
Here is a content curation tool that allows you to create your own “newspaper” online. You can set what notifications you would like by channel and keywords. It automatically populates with thought leaders and high-shared articles, videos, and images all across the web for whatever you want it to. You can use this to share across your channels in anyway you’d like. Many top users of Paper.li have full time subscribers to their online publication.
The beauty of this content curation tool is you can suggest content to other “scoopers.” A lot of these people have huge followings and some even have a PR3 ScoopIt page. All the content is within the system – you can use the search bar to find just about anything.
This tool analyzes your Facebook FanPage to find even more insights than Insights (get it?). Learn what’s working best, what posts do well, what times are best, what days are best and more. You can benchmark progress, view interactions and spy on competitors’ interactions.
Have you ever wondered what your niche market is reading online? Topsy helps you find the top content of your industry – all the links your ideal customers are clicking on, trending social engagements, etc.
Where Tweriod stops, Twitonomy picks up. This lets you see all kinds of stats for any Twitter profile you want, including your own. Who’s following whom, users most retweeted, users most retweeting, users mentioned, hashtags most used and more. Twitonomy is priceless for competitor spying!
Similar to Topsy, BuzzSumo helps you find all the greatest content and top influencers of your industry. Enter a topic and you’ll get tons of results from everywhere. What’s been shared, how many times its been shared, and who has shared it.
4. Keep it Real
Remember that your customers want to hear your voice in every post – so don’t get carried away with the automated tools. They are GREAT at helping you spend your time wisely and boost your effectiveness, but they can also lead down a slippery slope if you’re not careful. Social Media is your chance to show off your personality to your fans – don’t become a robot! Reserve the automation tools for finding content to curate, scheduling posts in advance, learning who’s who on social media in your industry, and discovering even more about your customers.
Then hop on your social media accounts and keep it real!
Have you found this information helpful? Are there other social media management tools you use to make your online marketing efforts more efficient? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
Recent Comments