Managers of social media platforms are a rare species. You need to have good time management skills, concentration, and social awareness. You need to have excellent communication, design, and writing skills as well. This position blurs the lines between artistic expression and administrative leadership.

Throughout the day, a social media manager communicates with many different people and juggles a number of different responsibilities.

Finding time to create and curate content, while also engaging in customer service and community building, and marketing and advertising can be difficult. Here are 11 suggestions to help you become more productive on social media if you’re feeling overwhelmed by everything you have to do.

1: Have a Plan, Objectives, and Strategy

Many modern businesses depend critically on their social media strategies. Customers now have high standards for how well brands interact with them on social media, how quickly they respond, and how much value they add to the main brand. A lack of responsiveness can have devastating effects on a company’s bottom line.

Creating a social media strategy document will help you concentrate your efforts, identify your goals, and map out a path to success. By narrowing your attention and organising your social media marketing strategy, you can increase your output while decreasing your time spent on non-productive activities.

Consider the following questions as you plot your strategy:

• For what purpose are you investing in social media advertising? Why are we going to all this trouble?
• If you’re going to use social media, what do you hope to accomplish? In what ways does this contribute to the company’s long-term goals?
• Who is it that you hope to communicate with and persuade to patronise your establishment? Ideally, how do you want consumers to perceive your company? What do you hope they’ll do as a result of your request?

If you can answer these three questions, you’ll have a much clearer picture of your strategy’s short- and long-term objectives.

Having a strategy in place is the first step, but you’ll also need a plan to ensure your success. Without a strategy, you risk squandering time as you flit from one thing to another. Instead of actively driving the growth of your business via social media, you’ll be forced to respond to what happens.

Depending on the complexity of your objectives, you may need to break them down into multiple, smaller projects. You can divide each project into manageable chunks that can be monitored and evaluated independently.

Decision paralysis, the inability to take action due to a lack of confidence in making choices, can be mitigated with well-thought-out plans. When everyone is on the same page with a plan, no more time needs to be wasted debating whether or not to move forward with the necessary projects and tasks.

For the vast majority of companies, a single content marketing plan is adequate to cover the strategy, goals, and plans needed for social media efforts. Read our primer on content strategy for a solid grounding in the fundamentals of content marketing strategy development.

2. Use Content Calendars and Social Media Analytics

Using a content calendar, you can plot out the posts you want to make on each social media site and schedule the various after-the-fact activities you want to do to promote them.

Content calendars are useful tools for managing time effectively. If blogging is one of your planned marketing tactics, for instance, you can write several articles at once and spread their publication out over a period of weeks with the help of Sprout’s publishing tools.

3. Pay Attention to High-Performance Platforms

Focusing on the social media channels that generate the most value for your company will help you get the most out of your time spent there.

To get started, evaluate how well and how much each of your social media channels is performing. Then, to maximise efficiency, put more time and money into the platform with the highest return on investment.

4.You Should Always Be Seeking New Knowledge

Managers of social media accounts must be well-versed in a wide variety of fields and current on all the latest marketing trends. Each manager of social media must:

• Competent with a wide range of social media platforms
• Skilled in overseeing social media advertising campaigns
• Aware of the systems each platform employs to determine which content users see
• Skilled with web analytics software and social media metrics

Improving your proficiency in areas such as:

Copywriting \sMarketing
Design for Project Management
Communication and presentation of data analytics
Additionally, it is crucial to be aware of the most recent trends in digital marketing. Connect with influential people and organisations in the social media marketing sector by following them on Twitter.

5. Take an avid interest in current events

You shouldn’t waste hours mindlessly perusing your feed. Read industry-specific blogs and newsletters. It is also possible to use a news aggregator service like Feedly to gather information from various sources in one convenient location.

feedly
Keep an eye out in particular for any breaking international news that could affect your brand. Take notes on stories you find using a tool like OneNote or Evernote and incorporate them into your content strategy.