We all know that however beneficial it may be social media can take up a lot of time. In fact experts estimate that the average SME business should spend 32 hours a month on each of their social media accounts to make them successful. So, we come up with 5 handy ways to save time on your social media and help you get on with what you need to be doing:

1)     Plan!  You’re going to save yourself masses of time if you plan what content you’re going to be putting out there. Get a feel for what your audience want and spend a little bit of time putting together some high value content. Time invested now will save you time daily in the long run.

2)     Schedule. Most social media sites have the capacity to schedule content but where that isn’t possible you can use free online tools like HootSuite. Scheduling your content means you can still share good quality content online at times when you would normally be too busy.

3)     Monitor. Monitoring and engaging is one of the biggest time saps, especially if you have multiple platforms that you need to log in and out of. Online tools like Tweetdeck and Hootsuite are useful for having all your accounts in one place so you can have an overview of everything that’s going on and interact where you need to.

4)     Watch the news. Keep one eye on (or one ear open for) topical events that may be relevant, that way you won’t miss out on anything you might later want to talk about. It doesn’t have to interrupt your work flow, and keeping current is a great way of staying on top of social media.

5)     Analyse. The most important thing that will save you time is to analyse your accounts. Check your audience and the engagement levels regularly so that you can adjust what you’re putting out there and make sure social media is really working for you. This will inevitably save you time, and stop you putting your energies into things that may not be working.