How to Increase Social Media Productivity

Running effective social media campaigns can be a lot of work. From content creation, community development, to customer service, social media managers have a lot on their plate. And to be effective at their jobs, social media managers need to maximize productivity. 

But how can you increase your social media productivity? 

What changes can you make to your daily routine that will help you get more quality work done and effortlessly meet your deadlines?

Don't worry, we are here to help. 

In this article, you will see proven strategies that will help you boost your social media productivity. These tips will help you run your social media strategies at peak efficiency while also reducing burnout. 

Let's get started.

Have a goal and plan

Having defined social media goals and a solid plan in place to realize these goals can significantly boost your productivity. 

Marketers and social media managers cannot afford to avoid setting up social media goals. 

Why?

Goals keep you accountable. Whether you are working for yourself or a client, having goals will help you determine if you are seeing a positive ROI from your social media efforts.

By defining your goals, you will be able to focus your efforts and pinpoint the actions you need to take to meet your business objectives. 

But note that having goals isn’t just enough. You need to have a plan to help reach your goals so you won’t have to leave things up to chance. Planning helps you set your priorities straight – it helps you identify what needs to be done now and eliminates excesses that would have occurred if you didn’t plan. 

Now that you know the importance of setting up social media goals, here is a simple framework you can use. 

Start with a broad objective

Starting with a broad objective makes it easy to determine the specific goals you need to set to see success. 

Ask yourself this question: why should your business be on social media? 

For instance, the broad objective of a small business can be to grow its community. A startup might want to boost brand awareness and an enterprise company might want to increase customer loyalty by improving customer service. 

With the broad objective in mind, you can then set up smaller goals that will help you actualize the broader objective. 

Set SMART goals

The SMART goal-setting framework gives you a sense of direction and helps you further organize your goals. 

The acronym stands for:

• Specific: Your goals need to be defined and clear. 
• Measurable: Your goals should have metrics that can be analyzed.
• Achievable: With the resources at your disposal, can you achieve the goals?
• Relevant: Does the goal(s) align with your organization's broader objective.
• Time-bound: Assign a deadline to reach the goal to keep you accountable. Also, define when you will start taking action. 

Assign KPIs to each goal

Each of your goals should have KPIs tied to it. 

Let's say you want to increase your brand awareness on Instagram, here are the KPIs you need to track: 

• Follower count
• Post reach
• Post impressions
• Link clicks 
  

So using the SMART framework, here is how you set it up.

• Specific: Increase awareness for my brand on Instagram
• Measurable: Increase follower count by 10%. Boost organic and sponsored posts reach by 20%. Increase link clicks by 15%.
• Achievable? – Yes.
• Relevant? – Increasing brand awareness correlates with the overall business objective for the quarter. Which is to increase the number of people that know about our brand and in the process boost sales. 
• Time-bound: The project will start in the first week of January and will last for three months. 
  

After assigning KPIs, the next step is to set up a plan on how you will achieve the goals. 

Ask yourself - how will you increase follower count or boost link clicks? Will you run campaigns that will attract new followers to your brand (e.g, contests, advertising, or influencer marketing, etc.)?

A plan helps you decide the next plan after setting up your goal and KPIs. 

Develop a defined process for tasks

First, let's see the difference between a strategy, plan, and process. 

A strategy is a solution that will help you go from point A to point B. While a plan is how you will move from point A to point B. The plan is a detailed proposal on how you want to achieve something. For instance, your strategy for boosting brand awareness can be to increase your follower count. And then your plan shows specifically how you will do it – by working with influencers or using social ads. 

On the other hand, your process is a defined way of carrying out your tasks. It can either be a linear process – do task A, then task B, before doing task C. Or it can be branched – do task A, then do task B or C depending on the objective, then do task D.

For a social media manager, the main purpose of having a defined process is to limit uncertainties. You don't have to waste a great deal of time or effort in creating new ways to achieve tasks that you have already done before. 

Having a defined process also comes in handy when you are onboarding a new member to your social media team. New team members will have a ready-made workflow map so they can start working immediately. 

You can use processes to document how you work with influencers, how you curate UGC content, or how you create social media posts, etc. 

Use content calendars 

A social media content calendar helps you organize your content by detailing what and when you should post. 

With a content calendar in place, you won't have to go through the stress of coming up with a topic when you are supposed to be getting down to work. It will help keep you organized, ensure that you don't have any content gaps or miss deadlines. 

Your content calendar also helps you stay ahead of the curve. It is very easy to forget important dates. But when you have created your content calendar months ahead, you will know when to prepare for promo posts, holiday events, etc. This will allow you to always create the best possible post for every occasion. 

A content calendar also boosts team productivity. The calendar ensures that everybody on the team is on the same page. Both sales, marketing, and product managers will have clear visibility into how the content efforts are going and the roles they have to play. 

Creating a content calendar is not difficult. You can access Iconosquare's quarterly Social Media Calendar for 2022 to use as a template. 

Every quarter, you will get 3 more months of events, hashtags, and special days. If you can't wait that long, you can get full access to the 12 months calendar on the Iconosquare scheduler. The scheduler will help you plan your content ahead and save you time.

Your 14-day free trial is waiting for you! 

Minimize time-wasting activities

Whether you are working from home or in an office environment, several activities can distract you from work and reduce your productivity. To be a successful social media manager, you need to develop ways to fight these productivity dampers. 

Here are some time-wasting activities to avoid:

Emails: How much time do you spend sending and checking emails each day? While email is a good communication channel, it's not the best option for teams. It is better to use real-time tools like Slack especially if you want to communicate with multiple people at once. Slack allows you to search conversations by channel, share files easily, and launch meetings all in one place.

Tip: Most times, it's better to pick up the phone for a quick and concise chat. Instead of going back and forth on an email thread. 

Meetings: The reality is that most meetings are unproductive and ineffective. In a survey of 183 senior managers, 65% said that meetings keep them from completing their work. So make a conscious effort to reduce the number of meetings that you attend. And when you do have a meeting, do the following: have an agenda, set a time limit, only invite the right people for the meeting, and structure the meeting.

Multitasking: Multitasking can make you feel like you are accomplishing a lot. But are you really? It's better to take on one single project and effectively see it to completion before taking on another task. Not only will taking on several projects at once limit your productivity, but it will also leave you feeling stressed and burnt out. 

Outsource routine work

Outsourcing routine tasks to other team members and even freelancers or agencies can help you boost your social media productivity. Simply put, outsourcing allows you to focus your efforts on what you do best. In the long run, it will help you increase efficiency, reduce fatigue, and boost your job satisfaction (all of which help you be more productive). 

The tasks that you can outsource are the ones that are time-consuming, too tedious, or that you don't have good knowledge about. It's better to outsource to someone who has more knowledge or experience than you for a specific task. It will be faster and sometimes even cheaper. Making mistakes on the job can be costly. 

A social media manager can outsource tasks like graphic design, monitoring brand reputation, reaching out to potential leads, etc. This will allow you to focus on your main duty which is overseeing the day-to-day management of social campaigns. 

Note: When outsourcing, make it clear what you want the person to do. Set expectations and tell the person what goal you want to achieve with the task. A clear guideline ensures that the final result meets your expectations.

Use social media automation

Social media automation is the process of using automated tools to reduce the amount of time you would spend on doing social media tasks that don't necessarily require human intervention. Examples include scheduling posts, analytics, or reporting. 

With social media automation, you can increase your productivity and free up time to interact with your audience and strategize about what content to share and when. 

Here are some ways you can automate your social strategy:

Schedule your posts

To see success from your social media marketing efforts, you need to be consistent. Consistent posting allows you to grow your brand presence and build brand recognition. 

A social media automation tool will allow you to have a steady queue of posts. So even when you are away from work, your audience is still hearing from you. It also allows you to spend less time on posting and more time on being creative. 

Engage with your audience

A social media automation tool will allow you to engage with your audience across several social media platforms in one place. You can monitor your replies, messages, and mentions in one software. This will help you save time and make it easy for you to connect with your audience. 

Use chatbots

Chatbots can be used with platforms like Facebook and Twitter to automate the marketing process. 

For example, you can use chatbots to automatically reply to common customer service questions. This is more efficient than waiting for hours to respond. You can also use it to let your audience know how long it will take before you get back to them. 

You can also use chatbots to sell and process customer orders, promote a product, etc. 

An example of a brand that takes advantage of chatbots automation is Lyft. 

You can order a Lyft directly from Facebook Messenger or Slack using chat. You can track the driver’s status, see a photo of the car model and license plate, and pay for your ride all from Messenger. 

Try out social listening tools

Most social media automation tools will allow you to use social listening. Social listening allows you to easily monitor mentions of your brand or product on social media. 

With a social listening tool, you can see mentions of your brand across all social media platforms in one place. You can also use it to monitor your competition and follow keywords/hashtags in your industry. 

Social listening will help give you an idea of what you are doing right. It also comes in handy when you are creating your social media strategy. Since you know what your audience likes and the latest trends, you will be more creative with your social media strategy. 

Analytics and reporting

Instead of manually analyzing the metric from all the social media platforms you are active in, you can use a social media tool to automate the process. You can also use the tool to automatically create reports.

You can use Iconosquare’s suite of tools to help automate your social media process. With Iconosquare, you can easily monitor what is being said about your brand with ease, spy on your competitors, track hashtags, schedule & manage your social media content, run in-depth analytics, and automate your social media reports in minutes. You can start your 14-day free trial here. 

Be careful of ‘fun work’

There is a productivity system called the task prioritization matrix. This matrix allows you to rate your tasks based on urgency. It helps you identify important tasks you should do now, and the ones you can leave for later. 

This image from Supporti explains the matrix better. 

With this table, you can divide your tasks based on the ones that will have the most significant impact on your business goals. 

But while setting up your matrix, be careful of ‘fun work’. These are tasks that bring little or no benefits to your business but are interesting to do. 

Note that being busy is not the same as being productive. 

It's best practice to spend your productive hours on priority tasks and minimize the amount of time you spend on less productive but interesting tasks. 

Wrapping up

In this article, we have seen how you can increase your social media productivity. 

The tips in this article are easy to get started with. As a reminder, here is a summary of the tips. 

• Have specific goals and a detailed plan
• Develop a defined process for tasks
• Use content calendars 
• Minimize time-wasting activities that reduce your productivity
• Outsource routine work so you can spend time on other important activities
• Use social media automation to help you work faster and effectively 
• Be careful of fun work that is of low importance to your business. 
  

Now it's over you. Which of these tips will you implement today?