Neal's Fave Social Media Productivity Tips & Tools

Welcome to maximize your social actionable 10 minute advice on how your business can maximize your social media presence. Now, the host of maximize your social social media author, speaker, consultant, and founder of maximize social business, Neal Schaffer. This is Neal Schaffer, welcome to another edition of maximize your social, you know, on my blog. Well, I blog at maximize your social, obviously, but my primary blog is maximize social business, which I hope you've all been checking out. This week, we had a great post by the founder and CEO of the social media dashboard market me sweet, Tammy calm fennel, and her post was on how to create a social media productivity plan. And as I was reading, I thought to myself, you know, I have a lot of social media productivity tips myself, that I really haven't shared with a lot of people. I've talked about dashboards and some tools, but I wanted to share my thoughts. And as always, I provide this information to my podcast listeners first, before I publish it on the internet. So as always, you want to make sure that you listen to my podcasts the minute they come out. My apologies that recently, since I was in Japan, the schedule has been a little bit infrequent. I'm trying to get back on course, published twice last week, two podcasts this week, that's been second. And next week, hopefully, we're going to get back to our weekly podcast on Tuesdays. So that's the plan, and I'm committed to it. So you know, social media, it's funny, social media has never been free. So the whole advent of paid social, why do we have to pay to get noticed in the Facebook newsfeed and yada, yada, yada, and to be honest with you, social has never been free, it's required time, it's required someone's time, right? You know, maybe the tools you use use free HootSuite or free buffer, what have you, but or maybe you know, $10 a month plans. But at the end of the day, it's the human resource cost that is there. And therefore, if somehow we can be more productive with our use of that time, visa vie social media, that's money in the bank, from my perspective. So I wanted to give to you my six ideas, or the sort of the six social media productivity tips or concepts that I use, that I believe helped save, you know, potentially a few hours a day from doing my social media work. So let me get started here, the first one is going to be and this is a necessity. We all know that content curation is essential for a successful social media presence, whether you're curating the tweets of your followers, whether you're curating photos of your fans on Instagram, or whether you're a b2b business, and you're curating authoritative resource for information representing your industry, you can't just talk about yourself all the time, it's almost impossible to do that and to maintain it for a long period of time. So in order to have a robust presence, you also need to be sharing other people's contents that you you're just not talking about yourself as well. So, you know, I've had Bob Geller on maximize social business. He's a content marketing expert. He's published a lot of different posts on why content curation is important for content marketing, how to curate content, like a pro of blogger maximize social business, and how to improve your content curation. So the beauty of content curation, though, from a social media productivity perspective, is that there's a myriad of different tools that are available now, that work at helping you not only find relevant content, but some actually go a step further and allow you to efficiently publish that curated content to a variety of social media accounts. Now I have used and continue to use a number of different solutions. And I'm going to share some of those with you. One is called I'll start with just general platforms that were specifically geared with creating algorithms to provide you relevant content, and to help you efficiently publish that content or schedule it for future publication. I think there's two in this category that really stick out that I've used. One is called sway SW, a why why next week, I'll be publishing the blog post that has all the links, but if you can't wait go to s w a y y. Another one is called Beatrix ba T Rix I've used both of them. They're both highly recommended. Now, I use Post Planner to help me curate content for my Facebook page. They have some unique and killer Facebook content curation functionalities. If you are trying to find content to curate buzz Sumo is an excellent application, which allows you to find the most shared relevant content on different social networks by topic or by user. And then we have three different communities have basically their communities of content creators that work together to help promote each other's content. Now, this is not everyone's cup of tea. And I think it's only going to be relevant to you if in these communities you find content that's relevant to your industry, but I'm going to throw them out there anyway. One is called try Number one is called Social Buzz Club. And one is Ooh, in fact, I misspelled a Treiber on my blog post I need to correct that. One is called Social Buzz Club and one is called viral content buzz. I've used all of these as well, you know, if you're going to curate content, why not curate content from people that are actually creating the content, I think you're going to be able to create more direct and engaging relationships than just curating content from the mass media right? Now, it should be noted that from a pure content creation perspective, there's also the use of Twitter lists of Google Plus circles of LinkedIn groups, even Facebook groups that you can use, you know, find your vehicle that helps you discover relevant content quickly. And then we have the dashboards of HootSuite and buffer even cloud that are now offering suggested content to post, the important thing is to find the tools that work for you that are helping you find the most relevant content and make it easy for you to control when and where your content is posted in the most efficient way. That's number one of six steps, right? That's my longest one. Number two, schedule your posts. These are posts that you create, your creative content should go out multiple times on multiple social networks. Not everybody is on the same network at the same time. It's okay, I'm not saying you run a blast Twitter 10 times the day you publish something, but you know, posting it twice, maybe waiting a day or two posting that again, waiting a few more days posting it again, it's almost become a best practice to repeatedly post in social media. Because of that, and I think that Guy Kawasaki has written a definitive post on how by repeatedly tweeting, he gets you know, 30 to I forgot what percent more people that actually clicked on his tweets. So there are three tools that I recommend here one, if you're on WordPress is WordPress jetpack publicize, which will automatically publish your post to several social networks, there's lots of different ways to doing it, you can use RSS and import them into Hootsuite, or Post Planner or marketing suite. But with Jetpack publicize does is it automatically publishes it from the source. And it publishes to personal Google Plus profiles, which is why I like it, we have co schedule, if you use WordPress co schedule is an excellent tool that not only helps in the collaboration of editing posts, and of dealing with your authors and editors in a collaborative and efficient environment. But it also gives you the ability to pre schedule tweets and posts that you can send out in an editorial calendar for you know, weeks or months to come. Right. And what I especially like about CO schedule as WordPress Jetpack, publicize handles personal Google Plus profiles, co schedule handles Pinterest, and you've been listening to me you understand that I'm a big Pinterest fan. And then we have SM Q SM, Q, u e, which after you create more than 100, tweets or posts, it will automatically randomly publish them to your social media profiles. And I use that as well. So you have a lot of different tools you use. Once again, these are for posts that you create yourself, your unique content that you want to promote repeatedly over time, using obviously manually created tweets. But using some sort of automated algorithm that's embedded in a tool to help you be more efficient and productive with your social media. Number three, use a dedicated browser, okay, it can be the same browser, you can have multiple windows, have a browser, but use a browser that is just for your social media accounts. Right. And if you do that, this will help you resist the temptation to check your Twitter account every five minutes or watching another video on YouTube or what have you. Keep them open and decide that I'm only going to look at my social media accounts once a day twice a day, set a timer, 30 minutes, 45 minutes, whatever it may be, I think if you can do that, you will be much more productive in your social media. Now, number four is on a similar note is sticking to a daily weekly routine. Okay, maybe there's some social networks where you're not that active, you don't have that much of an ROI that not that much engagement. You can even relegate them to once a week social networks. Or maybe there are things like engaging on Twitter that you want to do on a daily basis. But following follower management, or maybe LinkedIn invitations that you can do on a weekly basis. I think if you can create these daily weekly routines, you're going to be all the better and if you can create those social media boundaries, as I like to call them, and you stick to those daily weekly routines, you're going to get a really really good idea as to how much time you're spending doing what where's the ROI and therefore better at relegating things to a daily or weekly task and therefore becoming more not only productive but effective with your social media. Number five, get analytical. There are great platforms like Saif CYP some on that Netvibes that actually give you data across all your social networks to give you a sense as to where you're doing better, right, and insight, for instance, as to what sort of content you should be posting more or when you should be posting more. Now for specific social networking sites. I use Sprout Social for Twitter, I use Facebook Insights for Facebook, which is what Facebook group I, I use tailwind for Pinterest. And obviously, for my website, I use Google Analytics. Some of these are free some of these for a fee. Either way, you should check into them and get analytical. And by spending a little bit of time with your analysis that's going to help you say, You know what, I don't need to be posting as often or I don't need to be spending as much time as I have been on certain platforms, because I'm doing better and other platforms where I'm spending less time for instance, right. I'm number six, turn old into new, if you have used a blog as part of your social media strategy, as I recommend, you are publishing resourceful content that is probably evergreen, maybe not every post is evergreen, but you have a lot of evergreen posts, it's time to reuse those. Right? You can reuse your content for a variety of content marketing, mediums, infographics, ebooks, revising them to create new blog posts, podcasts, you don't always have to reinvent the wheel when you're creating content. And that's something really critical that you need to understand. I've tried all the tips that I've talked about, they all work for me, obviously, it comes down to your own personally feeling comfortable, and feeling that you're doing your best. And spending enough time and getting the ROI out of your activity is also in the background. While there are certain things I do to increase my productivity, the engagement always has to be organic, it always has to be natural. If you listen to my most recent podcast, where I talked about why are people on Instagram posting quotes, when it should only be used for authentically posting photos that you take at the spur moment with your smartphone, you understand that you cannot automate that engagement. And that's something that you need to do authentically. And that's really the whole idea behind this is if you can sort of use these tips to you know, semi automate, where possible, or really create this infrastructure that you effectively use for all of the non engaging activities that I talked about. This leaves you time for the actual engaging with other social media users, or actually creating unique content, which I think are two of the most important things that you obviously cannot automate. And that's where I went to see you spent your most time in social. That's it maximize your social as a podcast dedicated to empowering your use of social for your business. I hope this podcast as all of them helped meet that objective. Always welcome your feedback, your questions, your requests. Neal Schaffer, maximize your social.com. I'm out there. Signing up for today, everybody. Hope you enjoyed the podcast. If you did, would you mind leaving a five star ranking on iTunes or maybe sharing it on social media, letting your friends know that there's a new voice in the world of social media podcasts? It's Neal Schaffer to maximize your social wow, I sound cocky. I better calm down here. Okay. I'm gonna stop with that. That's not my brand at all. But anyway, I am confident in the information I provide. And I really do hope it helps you. And that's it for today. Wherever you're on the world, make it a great social Day. Bye Bye, everybody. Thanks for listening to maximize your social. We appreciate your iTunes subscriptions, ratings and comments. If you would like to appear on this show or recommend content, please contact Neal Schaffer at Neal at maximize your social.com make it a social day.