I don’t need to tell you that effective social media engagement is essential to growing your business, but effective here’s a keyword. Social websites are not called Social for no reason: they are friendly by nature. To be successful at SMM, you need to focus on building relationships and avoiding the sales pitch or at least making it subtle.
Needless to say, the process can be time consuming, especially with the flood of social media options out there. So how can you take advantage of SMM without spending too much time on it? Here are some tips to help you.
Tip 1: go for profitable delegation that produces proven results
I often feel that doubling or tripling the number of fans / friends on my Facebook page is time consuming and boring until I was browsing a freelance site and came across this interesting job post: “I’m looking for someone to add friends to my Facebook account from a certain city. I’m looking to add 3000 friends from a certain area. “
Guess what, the employer offered $ 15 for this job and a lot of candidates lined up. The beauty of hiring freelancers to do the “donkey work” on your behalf is that it saves your precious time for what really matters, plus there is no risk involved here as you only pay for the results. In fact, I would recommend that you explore the job openings on some freelance sites for more ideas on what time-saving tasks you can delegate. A good place to check is oDesk because they have a category for SMM jobs.
Also, if writing is not your thing, it is worth hiring an SEO copywriter to take care of your blog content because if your blog did not stand out to your niche, others will and you certainly don’t want that.
Also, hiring a professional to do some short but great video presentations about your business to get posted on YouTube and your own site is definitely an investment.
Time is money. Sometimes “buying” some of your valuable time for just a few dollars can be a good decision. And if you go the independent sites route, you will always end up with a good deal.
Tip 2: Be selective
You need to be very selective and choose the best social media sites that are in line with your business goals. As you do so, think about quality versus quantity. In other words, it’s better to have quality profiles on 3 social sites and take the time to build a powerful presence there than simply create profiles on 1000 sites that you probably wouldn’t visit again. At the very least, you should go to Twitter, Facebook, and your own blog. And hey, YouTube is a fantastic visibility magnet, so keep that in mind! Later, you can also add LinkedIn to the mix.
Tip 3: leverage technology
There are so many free tools available online that help you schedule your social media posts, the most popular of which is ping.fm. You can dedicate 2 hours a week to the previous programming of your publications and voila!
With that said, it’s important to realize that these automated tools only deal with the “streaming” side of social media on your behalf. It still needs to be present effectively in some carefully selected social networking sites to answer questions, interact, and build relationships with your niche. Good luck!