There’s no doubt about it, Facebook can be a real time suck, if you don’t use it wisely. But believe it or not, if you take the time to PLAN now, you’re going to save a lot of time later.
Taking the time in advance to define your audience, organize your information, create a publication calendar, as well as brainstorming and creating content along with the judicious use of management tools will go far in being more efficient AND will help you get better results.
#1: Define Your Audience – Know who you’re sharing with so that it’s easier to know how to phrase your updates, as well as to know what updates will be important to your fans. If you know your audience well you’ll avoid waiting your time and theirs will irrelevant posts.
#2: Create a Publication Calendar – You can use Google Calendar as your publication calendar. Simply create a new calendar called Facebook Calendar or whatever you want to call it and create an entry each day for the types of content you want to post. If you click edit, you can check the box to repeat entry.
#3: Brainstorm Content – Know exactly what type of content you want to create to share on Facebook in advance. Everything you share should have a purpose of some kind. Don’t just share things for no reason. Knowing in advance what you’ll share and why you’ll share it is a time saver because it keeps you from wasting time sharing content without a purpose.
#4: Create Content – Whenever you sit down to create content, do so in batches. Creating several blog posts about the same topic at once is faster. You only have to research once, then start writing based on that research. Your mind will get into the flow of writing. Then you can schedule the posts in WordPress easily. Next, either grab the links to share on Facebook manually (using Facebook’s schedule feature or another third party app scheduling feature), or using another app to share automatically with Facebook like NetworkedBlogs to speed up the process will help you work faster. Do be cautious about too much automation without a comment by yourself on each shared piece of content.
#5: Get Organized – The content you want to share should be inside a spreadsheet with links ready to grab. These can also be uploaded to Google Drive. When you create a new blog post, or new content, or find content on the web that you want to share, grab the link immediately and stick into your spreadsheet for sharing during your 10 minutes.
#6: Use Third Party Apps – Apps like the cloud-based MarketMeSuite , Hootsuite Pro, and others can help you automate your social media marketing strategy in a simple way. You can manage all of your social media for Facebook from one inbox. Messages can be scheduled in advance and appear without any type of branding or appearance of scheduling from a 3rd party app in some cases. Be cautious about using too much automation especially if the program announces it came from a third party app.
#7: Use Facebook Features – Use any feature Facebook already offers. One of the features Facebook already offers business pages is the ability to schedule posts. When you start to create an update just click on the little clock, then pick the year, month, day that you want your update to appear on your time line.
#8: Hire a Virtual Assistant – Hiring a contractor to help you with social media like Facebook is a great way to help create more time for engaging with others. Only you can truly engage with your audience, but anyone can post the planned updates and content to your Facebook page. If you outsource the things that don’t require personal attention, you can then focus only on what does require personal attention.
Using Facebook to promote your business only needs to take ten minutes per day if you have everything planned out in advance, entered into a calendar and transferred to your “to do” list. Get started now with daily Facebook activity that will increase awareness, traffic and sales…and it should only take you about 10 minutes a day to get done.