How to Produce More and Work Less as a Social Media Marketer

You can easily spend a full day of work creating just one Instagram Story. But when you manage multiple social media channels, you can’t afford to spend so much time on each content piece. It’s counter-productive, and it hurts your professional development.

As a social media marketer, how do you spend less time on content creation and produce better results? 

In the article, we’re offering an actionable strategy to becoming a more productive (and less busy!) social media marketer.

What does a social media marketer do?

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Whether you’re new to the industry or you need a reminder of just how much work is involved within the field of social media marketing, let’s review the key responsibilities. 

A social media marketer builds a company’s online presence by filling its social media accounts with engaging content and interacting with audiences. Yet their responsibilities aren’t limited to sharing content and replying to comments. 

To develop, update and execute a strong social media strategy, a specialist needs to:

• Stay in the loop on industry trends
• Keep an eye on competitors’ campaigns
• Know audiences’ preferences
• Monitor content performance and profile audience growth
• Analyze performance and engagement data 
• Make informed decisions on adjusting the company’s social media strategy
• Be proficient with social media marketing tools
• Have experience with creating different content formats using a variety of media types
• Monitor and respond to brand mentions
• Address prospects’ and customers’ concerns

A social media marketer juggles a lot of things. With this in mind, efficiency is undoubtedly a highly important feature of a high-performing specialist. This is true for in-house marketers who work for companies, but it’s even more true for those who freelance or work for agencies, in which case maintaining scalability is a key aspect of the job.

Why social media marketers strive for efficiency

With the importance of social media marketing for brand promotion, the demand for social media marketers has grown in the last decade. More and more people see potential in becoming a social media marketer which also means that the number of SMM managers is growing. 

At the same time, constantly improving work efficiency is critical for social media marketers for at least three reasons:

• Social media managers often multitask: Social media marketing is all about multitasking. You’ve just seen a summary of the social media marketer’s daily routine. And it’s not even an exhaustive list of all the tasks you as a social media manager deal with on a regular basis. To be able to multitask without missing anything, you need to optimize your workflows and spend your time more effectively.

• Social media platforms are constantly evolving: Trends change rapidly, and so do social media platforms. Marketers need to keep up with all the updates released by every platform in their arsenal if they want to stay ahead of the competition. Work efficiency is the key. Optimized routines allow social media marketers to dedicate time towards staying on top of the latest trends and take advantage of them promptly.

• The competition is intense: No matter what social media platform you use more often, whether Instagram, Facebook, or TikTok, you’re surely seeing competition increasing day by day. To outperform your competitors, you need to be the first to follow trends and innovate. And if you struggle to cope with routine tasks, there’s no room for creative experimentation in your calendar. Before you can realize strategies that help you to stand out amongst your competitors, you need to simply free up your time for it. 

Being a social media marketer means having too much on your plate. So how do you become more productive without overworking? Here are seven tips for producing more while working less.

1. Learn all the platforms’ key features 

How well do you know the social media platforms you work with every day? 

You’ll be surprised how many opportunities are hidden inside different channels once you look into features other than content publishing. 

For instance, Instagram offers a lot of features typical users aren’t aware of: grid pinning, audience insights, high-quality uploads, etc. Meanwhile, TikTok is way richer in ‘hidden gems,’

offering great editing capabilities and exclusive features that you need to educate yourself on to make the most out of the platform. And Twitter has the quick reply feature that allows social media managers to send canned responses to frequently-asked questions without typing them over and over again.

When exploring the least known features of your platforms, you might find the ones that save your time and make you a better marketer. 

2. Keep up with social media news and trends

To keep your audience engaged and never run out of ideas, you’d better find a way to stay on top of industry news and trends. Instead of wasting hours wading through media that might inspire your future campaign, you can create a setup where you always have access to the most relevant content. 

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Start by taking four simple steps:

• Follow platform-specific newsrooms, such as Facebook Newsroom, TikTok Newsroom, LinkedIn Pressroom, etc.
• Follow your competitors’ social accounts
• Follow niche influencers and thought leaders
• Follow relevant topics or categories (e.g. on Twitter, you can specify the topics you want to stay updated on)

Allocate 20 minutes every morning to analyze your content performance, look through the news, and you will be armed with all the necessary information to produce content that drives engagement here and now.

3. Use handy tools and apps for content creation 

Built-in content creation tools offered by social media platforms aren’t sufficient if you want to win the audience’s attention with your content. They might help you to create one channel-specific post at a time, but that isn’t scalable, and anyway, the functionalities will be severely limited.

Add an editing app like Videoleap to your toolkit to create content that meets today’s high standards. The tool will let you create eye-popping videos in no time. Custom effects and transitions, masks, chroma-key, and many more – with Videoleap’s features, you’ll not only deliver high-quality videos but also speed up the content creation process.

For those managing multiple social media accounts for one brand, Videoleap offers easy content optimization and repurposing – you can export different content versions with creative variations, adjust duration, and resize videos to make them meet the specifications of different platforms.

4. Plan social media content in advance 

If you use social media templates to make content fast, that's great. Now it's time to create a social media calendar and plan your content in advance. This way, you can batch your time and schedule a series of posts in one go. 

This also enables you to keep your social media strategy under total control and prevent negative consequences of unexpected events, which will surely happen at the most inopportune moment.

Iconosquare will help you with it. Plan out your content for Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter and publish it automatically with the help of the social media analytics, management, and scheduling platform. No matter what, Iconosquare will keep your social media accounts active. 

5. Work together with your social media team

The inability to delegate and collaborate is the biggest productivity blocker. 

You need to learn to work together with your social media marketing team to get things done faster, whether it’s coming up with fresh ideas, bringing them to life, or getting them approved by the required stakeholders.

Your colleagues can bring in more fresh perspectives, assist you with production of content assets, offer help with the editing process, or just share insights they’ve gained from campaigns similar to yours. 

But if you're a freelance social media marketer, you can also hire a social media moderator and use training videos to educate your coworker on how to monitor profiles, check out brand mentions, and communicate with engaged followers. After all, social media brand communication takes a considerable amount of time these days.

6. Analyze social media performance

One more essential step toward improving your social media work efficiency is taking a look back at what you’ve done previously and how it has worked out. By gathering and analyzing performance data, you’ll be able to identify areas for improvement and make better decisions on your social media strategy.

For example, you may find out that your followers show high interest in fan-made content which means an opportunity to save time on creating overly-polished product social media posts that don't bring value to your potential customers.

Obviously, you can use in-app analytics or rely on Iconosquare. It also offers a powerful monitoring and analytics toolkit for social media marketers who care about the performance of their content.

7. Regularly take courses and master classes 

Finally, never stop upskilling. As has been said, new trends and best practices are appearing constantly. So even if you think you’re already a mature marketer, go and check out for upskilling opportunities at least twice a year. 

With a big number of MOOCs on the market, when people have an opportunity to obtain knowledge or improve skills on the go, it's no longer a problem to find a course and pass it online. On educational platforms like Udemy, you’ll find a rich selection of social media marketing courses for specialists of any level. For instance, once you nail the basics of social media marketing that help you get more real followers and higher engagement, it’s good to master automation best practices to scale your social media promotion with less manual effort.

Conclusion

It’s difficult to stay productive when you manage multiple tasks at a time. But you can achieve it by creating more structured workflows and using helpful tools. These seven simple tips will help you take your first steps toward higher productivity and a reduced workload.