If social marketing is frustrating to you, you’re not alone. Many businesses set up their social profile pages with the best intentions, only to let them sit with just a few old posts. If you are in this situation, you’re missing an opportunity to use the marketing resources you created.
Two of the most common reasons businesses don’t take full advantage of their social pages are, not knowing what to information to share and the perception that it takes too much time to post regularly. Getting over these hurdles is easier than you think, and all it takes is a little planning.
Spending just a few minutes a month of identifying, organizing and scheduling what to post on your social channels goes along way to getting the most out of your social marketing. Regular posting helps increase awareness, customer engagement and helps get your message out to a broader audience as you build your social following.
The first thing you should do is identify opportunities to share information with your social audience. I advise my clients who are having trouble coming up with social content ideas to begin with their work calendar. Open your calendar and review the next six weeks. What do you see? If you are like most business people, you see meetings, deadlines, holidays, vacations, company events, company milestones, business trips, new projects, trade shows, etc. What you may not realize is that all of these can be seeds for your social content. Use these events as opportunities to share useful information on your social pages.
Next, take action. Pick one (or more) events for each of the upcoming weeks and write a simple note about each one. Keep it short and informative and include a way for the reader to get more information if they want it. Adding a link to your website or a document is always beneficial.
Now, drop these notes on your calendar with a reminder as a social media promotion item for that day. As you get better at it, you will get faster but don’t let this process take more than 20 to 30 minutes. The point isn’t to get everything scheduled just a few things spread out over the next few weeks. As your reminders pop up over the upcoming weeks, just grab the note and paste it to your Twitter or Facebook feeds.
To help you get started, we created a free social media marketing calendar so you can plan the next six weeks promotions. You can download it below. Print it out and use it to make note of events that you want to share.
Plan out your social media marketing with this free 6 week calendar. Download here.
If you want to make this process even easier, you can use a tool that allows you to schedule your posts publish in the future. By using a tool like our social media control panel, you could have regular social media content done for weeks to come in just a few minutes.
Here is how it works. Grab the notes you created and add them to the schedule for the month. Click on the “Schedule New Content” button and paste one of the notes into the text field. Set the social media pages you want 
to publish too, select the day and time, and then click “Add to schedule”. Done! Add each note this way and you will have an excellent stream of fresh content being published to your accounts for weeks to come.
For a free demonstration of our online social command center click here and enter your email. The password is “demo”.