Can’t keep up? 8 Ways to Simplify Your Social Media Life

Are you feeling overwhelmed by the need to participate on social media?

If you are using social media as part of your professional life you are probably wondering how to keep up with the torrent of updates that come your way and how to publish engaging content without burning out.

After six years of presence on all major social media platforms as part of my full-time blogging enterprise at Italiansinfuga.com, I would like to share what I have learnt on simplifying my social media life.

1. Choose Your Platforms

There are many social platforms. Too many to be able to use them all effectively (and I am only thinking of the major ones).

Not all of them are suitable for you and you are not suitable for all of them.

Decide as early as you can which ones suit you and your business objectives.

This will be determined largely by the demography of the user base of the platform and how it fits in with what your business has to offer.

Is your customer base predominantly female and you offer ‘things’ for sale? Pinterest!

Are you operating a B2B enterprise? LinkedIn should probably be your platform of choice.

My advice is to be selective in the social media platform you choose otherwise you run the risk of spreading your resources too thin without a reasonable return.

For instance, I quickly discovered that Instagram wasn’t the right fit for me so I stopped using it. Similarly Twitter, as fun as I find it in my personal life, is not the best use of my time from a professional perspective.

2. Limit Time on Social Media

If you don’t set time boundaries on your use of social media you risk spending all day on it while achieving little from a business perspective.

Depending on your need to be present on social media, set aside a block of time each day to dedicate to social media activities and be ruthless about it.

Once the time is up, go back to your ‘real’ job and make sure that you produce something that you can talk about on your next social media excursion.

3. Use a Social Media Command Center for Monitoring

There are plenty of tools that allow you to monitor and manage social media activity in one place. I personally use Hootsuite.

Thanks to these tools you can monitor important updates for you and your business within one application without having to visit each social media platform separately.

It saves you a lot of time and effort, making the whole activity much more efficient and effective.

4. Engage With Your Followers (but realize You Can’t Engage with Everyone)

One of the great features of social media is the ability to engage with people.

Whether they are your customers, potential customers, other professionals or companies, engaging is the best way of building a social media profile.

However you can't engage with everybody all the time.

The sooner you realize this, the better.

It’s unfortunate but you will need to make choices with regards to how many people you engage with.

The alternative is that you will go crazy trying to please everybody.

5. Be Selective on Who You Follow

The more people you follow on social media the higher chances that you will come across interesting people and content.

The downside of this approach is that the ‘hose’ can become too wide to be manageable.

The inflow of content grows so much that you end up missing out on excellent content because it is drowned by the ‘noise’.

Maybe you started following an influencer because a particular post was very relevant to you and your business. It turns out that the following posts are not as relevant and now, irrespective of the quality of the writing, his or her articles do not offer the same value to you as that original article did. It’s probably time to ‘unfollow’…

Be very selective on who you follow and the whole social media experience will become simpler.

6. Understand What Works with Your Audience

To simplify your social media life you need to understand what your audience responds to so that you can produce more of what they want and, conversely, waste less time on content readers do not appreciate.

By being more effective in what content you produce, you streamline your publishing activity.

Almost all social media platforms provide some sort of analytics feature that allows you to see how many views, likes, comments and shares your content has received.

The ‘secret’ is to judge all the metrics not in absolute terms but in relation to the number of views for each piece of content.

7. Schedule Your Publishing Activity

By using a tool like Hootsuite you are able to plan in advance what you are going to publish on social media and when. This allows you to be present on social media even when you are not physically connected to the internet (gasp!).

You can plan a publishing schedule hours, weeks or months in advance and liberate yourself from the need to go online at regular intervals to post the content.

Because you know what happens when you go on a social media platform “for 5 minutes, just to post an article…”? An hour later you realize that….

8. Re-share Successful Old Content

Once you find out that a particular piece of content has been appreciated by your audience, think about re-posting at regular intervals.

As long as the content is evergreen, publishing it again saves you time otherwise spent on producing new content.

Remember that not necessarily all your followers saw it the first time round and it would be cruel to deny them that chance!!!

What other ways to simplify your social media life can you think of?