Managing a business social media account can be a time-consuming process – there is a lot of work involved in developing attractive material to share and publishing it across platforms. This article explores some of the difficulties associated with managing a social media presence, as well as opportunities to reduce the difficulties associated with posting material.
Pain points with managing social media accounts
When considering ways of improving your approach to social media posting, there are several pain points it is first worth considering.
Finding content to post
An initial difficulty in managing a business social media account is finding material to post to the accounts. Coming up with material to post on the spur of the moment can be a challenging task – it is not easy to consistently come up with ‘new’ content to promote.
Forgetting to post
One of the difficulties with managing social media accounts is actually remembering to post to the account. If you are running your own business, you will likely have lots of pressing activities, and posting to social media is one that is easy to push off.
Sporadic posting
Connected to forgetting to post, is a tendency to have a lot of content ready to go at the same time. This can result in sporadic posts – nothing for months, and then suddenly five or ten posts in a day.
Posting on multiple services
A final pain point associated with maintaining business social media accounts is having to post across multiple services. If you have Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram accounts having to post content across each can be a time-consuming process.
Approaches to reducing the effort required for managing a social media account
Developing a social media calendar
One of the key ways of reducing the pressure to continually come up with new content is to develop a schedule of material that you will be posting several months in advance. Even if you need to adjust this schedule, to incorporate new developments impacting your firm, having a prepared material ready to post can take the pressure of continually having to come up with new material.
Some of the advantages of developing a social media schedule include:
- Taking the pressure of having to continually find material: Because the material is developed in advance, there is no last-minute panic to find content – you can gradually build the content you have, adding it to your schedule as you think of new ideas to share
- Reducing sporadic posting: By determining in advance when the material will be posted, you can ensure that content is spread out and posted frequently, without intense bursts.
- Allowing you to produce the content in batches: Depending on your style, you may find it easier to produce much of your social media content in batches – avoiding the need to continually find time to fit it in.
- Ensuring balance to your social media posts: The final benefit of scheduling your content in advance is that it allows you to give consideration to the diversity of content that you are publishing – interspersing product information with more engaging content, so as to not overload your followers with any particular format of content.
Scheduling posts in advance
Once you have developed content in advance to share, an important next stage to reduce the ongoing effort to manage your profiles is to schedule the posts to share using a scheduling service. You can either use (typically only available using the business version of social media accounts), or a third-party service.
Some of the most prominent third-party services to consider include:
Whether you are using a third-party service or the platform-provided social media tools, you will be able to set the time that the posts will go live, as well as to see a preview of how the posts will look.
The benefit of the third-party program is that they allow you to schedule posts to be shared on multiple social media platforms. This can simplify the approach – allowing you to re-use, or adapt, the same content across multiple channels that you are managing.
Final thoughts
While maintaining a social media presence can be critical for some forms, for others, there is little to no benefit derived from having a presence on social platforms. Before simply copying other firms in setting up a social media account, consider whether the benefits associated with running a business social media account outweigh the effort and time required to do so.
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