Dominate Social Media With 3 Killer Metrics

DO YOU remember when metrics were all about hard data? You looked at spreadsheets that contained inbound searches, conversions, and other numbers, then used those numbers to determine how well your campaign was performing. That wasn’t a lot of fun, but at the time, it was effective.

Luckily, social media has managed to move metrics beyond hard data. You already know that you need to pay attention to “Likes,” referral traffic, and other common social media metrics. What you may not realize is that there are other important metrics that brands often forget about.

These metrics go beyond “Likes” – they let you see what is really going on with your customer base and stay on top of your social media presence. Now you have the opportunity to gauge how people feel about you – allowing you to see the people behind the numbers.

Suddenly, you see “Joe” and “Sue” instead of “Customer X” and “Customer Y.”

Brand Sentiment

Brand sentiment is one of the best ways to find out what Joe, Sue, and the gang have to say.

First, though, let’s take a closer look at this metric.

Brand sentiment refers to the emotion that people display when they mention your brand. Most people are emotional on social media, so with brand sentiment, you can measure happiness, annoyance, excitement, anger and more to get a better idea of how people view your company.

In fact, studies have shown that messages online could influence emotions offline, allowing you to really tap into a positive emotional state and link that – in a productive way – to your brand.

This emotional aspect goes beyond simply looking at mentions, and gives you insight into how people truly feel when they interact with you, or are exposed to your content on social media.

Measuring Brand Sentiment & Using the Results

As much as you may want to make your least favorite employee measure every social media mention, there is a better way to assess brand sentiment.

Social Mention is one of the best tools out there. Type the name of your brand into the site’s search bar and you will get sentiment statistics across various networks. You will see the number of positive, neutral, and negative mentions and get a sentiment ratio.

Hootsuite Insights is another great option. You can get a report for overall sentiment and then break it down by location, gender, and language. That way, you can determine whether your sentiment is solid across the board or if you have weak spots that you need to address.

You’ll need to gauge your brand sentiment on a daily basis, checking for any positive or negative changes. If you notice a drop in sentiment, you should determine what caused the decline.

A drop may have to do with something in your industry, or it may be brand specific. Either way, you need to address the problem so your brand sentiment doesn’t continue to slide.

This is obviously going to take some trial and error, but if you catch the issue quickly by monitoring your results, you’ll be in much better shape.

Plus, once you get the hang of it and start taking the right action to get things back on track – your public perception will be back on the upswing. Let’s face it – Brand Sentiment is really like a popularity contest, and you always want to come in first!

Customer Response Rates

Brand sentiment is just one piece of the puzzle. Put another piece in by measuring your customer response rates.

According to a social media industry report by Sprout Social, 43 percent of the messages people send to brands on social networks require a response. That is a huge increase from the 15 percent that required a response in Quarter 3 of 2013.

Unfortunately, a lot of brands haven’t made the adjustment to this change. They either don’t check their social media inboxes on a regular basis, or check them but treat the platform the same way they treat email. They will get to it when they get to it. It might be a day, or it might be a week.

If you find yourself getting lazy about responses, it could cost you some customers. While you might want to wait until tomorrow, it’s a good idea to take action today.

If you fail to message people back in the timeframe they want, you can expect to experience a fall out. Sixty percent of people say they dish out some type of negative consequence when they don’t receive a timely response, including telling their friends and family, escalating the concern, or buying less from the company in the future.

So, without adequate follow up, you could be setting yourself up for a negative – and public – response from over HALF of the customers who reach out to you!

Let’s look at how to avoid that, shall we?

Measuring Response Rates & Using the Results

Use an analytics tool like Sprout Social to track response rates and streamline replies. Once you have your rates in hand, work on improving them to really optimize your customer relations.

Need some hard quantifiers to get started? Aim to keep your response rate within an hour or two to really maintain customer happiness.

According to Search Engine Watch, 65 percent of Twitter users expect a response within two hours when they send a message to a brand. The percentage goes up when people send complaints to brands. In fact, 72 percent of people expect the brand to message them back within an hour when they submit a complaint.

You can always get faster, whether you need to hire a team dedicated to responding to messages or provide around-the-clock service.

Share of Voice

So far, you have looked at metrics that focus on your brand. Now, it’s time to switch gears and look at a metric that focuses on your competitors.

You need to see how you stack up against the competition, which is why the share of voice metric is critical.

Share of voice (SOV) refers to the number of mentions your brand receives when compared to the number of mentions that your competition receives. For example, if brands within your industry receive 100 mentions, and you end up with 50 of those mentions, your SOV is 50 percent. That is fantastic and really shows the influence of your brand within your target group AND niche.

On the other hand, if you only have 5 mentions, your share is at 5 percent. That means you need to roll up your sleeves and get to work to improve it.

Share of voice is about more than just dominating the conversation. It can also help you increase your market share. According to the Nielsen Company, if your share of voice is larger than your share of market, your market share will grow. The research company states that if your SOV is 10 points higher than your share of the market, your market share will grow half a percent. The percentage continues to go up as your SOV increases.

Measuring Share of Voice & Using the Results

Analytics programs make measuring your share of voice a snap. You can compare keywords to see which brand is dominating the market. You just need to run a report comparing the keywords to determine how you fare against the competition.

For some quick tips on breaking down your own personal results, be sure you have a Social Mention search ready to go, and then take a look at this quick article on creating a Share of Voice Report by Convince & Convert.

This quick analysis will really help you know where you stand. This is a great – and useful – way of levelling the playing field, simply by being in-the-know.

From there, you can up your game, and increase your SOV accordingly. Simply spend some time looking at what your top competition is doing, and take some notes about where you can improve:

• Does your competition have consistently active viewers due to really engaging posts?
• Is their content upbeat and positive, increasing their brand sentiment?
• Do they reply quickly to customer mentions, which results in a great customer response rate?

See how quickly each of these killer metrics become interwoven, and how they are all so important?

Coming Full Circle

When it comes to analytics, a lot of the most important metrics get ignored. But, being aware of the impact certain stats can have – and how they influence each other – may really help you hone in on the best marketing plan for your social media efforts.

Brand sentiment, response rate and share of voice can each provide a snapshot of how your strategy resonates with your viewers. All together, they become a powerful assessment of your overall performance and reputation on social media.

Get started now: add these analytics to your marketing strategy so you can improve your customer experience and your bottom line.

While you’re at it, take a quick look at these ways to boost your social media efficiency and really up your social media game!

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10 FREE SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING TOOLS

10 FREE SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING TOOLS

Buzzsumo
Used by many brands, Buzzsumo hits the nail while generating the right content on social media! It's simple, straightforward and gives you, in a matter of seconds, the current search rate of your "look-alike" content 

Canva
Canva is a market place for designer tools. All you need is a bit of creativity and a clear vision of your design and Canva gives you much more than what you asked for. 

Hashtagify
Hashtagify helps you know how your hashtags rank in the social channels. type your desired hashtag in the search bar and you'll get the top 10 hashtags related to it, direct and to the point.

Buffer
Buffer is Easy and extremely efficient to schedule your social media posts. It's just a click away process and the best part is the weekly reports of how your tweets have performed!

Hootsuite
Hootsuite is similar to Buffer in scheduling your social media posts. if you are new into social media marketing I would personally recommend starting with Hootsuite as it's comparatively easier to understand.

How Sociable
How Sociable is to literally find out how sociable your brand is! A free account in How Sociable gives you access to monitor 12 social media accounts simultaneously which honestly, is quite a successful start for any business. 

Social Mentions
Social Mentions is perhaps the easiest way to monitor your brand's mentions in the wide web. All you have to do is mention your brand name or any target keyword and give it a second before you have your results bubbling on the screen.

Tweet Deck
Tweet Deck allows you to maintain, monitor, schedule and analyze your tweets. With lots of options available, it is perhaps the best social media monitoring tool for Twitter.

Google Analytics
If you are looking to analyze your social presence, Google Analytics is what you should be looking for! It's deep, insightful and although it requires time and effort to study its various features, it's a life savior, precisely giving you what you want, at all times!

FollowerMonk
Designed by Moz, FollowerMonk gives you all the necessary details of your twitter page like who your followers are, their geographic location and even influencers who can help you

SproutSocial

SproutSocial is a holistic tool as it helps you schedule, monitor and analyze your presence in the social world. It's prominent as it also includes social CRM tools and team collaboration tools, that sets it apart form the rest of its competitors!

Tips on How to Win at Social Media Marketing

With the growing number of businesses using social media for their marketing campaigns, how can yours stand out? Read on and discover the arsenals that can help you win at social media marketing.

Whether your business is only starting or one that’s been up and running for decades, social media marketing – when done right – can help you significantly expand your market and customer base.

Marketing your brand or business in various social media networks and platforms can positively contribute to your acquisition of customers, and eventually, sales.

The Basics
Every success starts with a goal and the foundations that ground them. The same thing is true for social media marketing; you need to understand the social media marketing fundamentals. To get you started on the right foot, here are ten social media marketing laws developed by Susan Gunelius, an author and the CEO of a marketing communications company.

• Listening. Before you think of creative campaigns, get to know and listen to your audience first. Figure out their needs, interests, and the things important to them. A campaign no matter how great will be useless if it won’t add value to your audience.

• Focus. Focus on what your brand is about and how it can add value to the lives of your target audience. Ground your campaigns with your goals. Don’t attempt to be all things for all people. Refrain from being a jack-of-all-trades. Keep your focus.

• Quality. A huge number of followers is nothing if these followers don’t engage with you. Pursue quality relationships with your audience. Engagement is more important than mere numbers of followers. Pursue and work on long-lasting connections.

• Patience. Take your time and don’t be too hard on yourself because, as cliché as it may sound, success doesn’t really happen overnight. And as you practice patience, never let your commitment to your business’s success die down and quiver.

• Compounding. This law goes with the law of quality. If you commit yourself to sharing quality and valuable content, it will also yield quality and valuable followers in return – aka those who will share, talk about, etc. your content to others as well.

• Influence. Finding appropriate influencers to partner with in your social media marketing campaigns can greatly improve your brand’s marketing, leads, traffic, and sales. With the help of influencers, it’ll be easier to reach new and larger audiences.

• Value. In sharing your content, products, and services online, try your best not to be too sales-y. If you bombard people with promotions instead of value, you will lose them. Focus more on providing them valuable content. Build lasting connections.

• Acknowledgement. Never neglect and be a snob to people who try to reach out through a comment, message, etc. Never forget to acknowledge these people and reply. If you always make them feel noticed, you’ll be able to keep them for good.

• Accessibility. Always be present and available to your audience. Making a disappearing act is a big no-no. You must be consistent not only in sharing and publishing valuable content, you must also keep the connection through engagement.

• Reciprocity. To be successful in social media marketing, you shouldn’t only talk about yourself and your business. You also need to allot some time to share and talk about the content of others too. In the long run, they’re most likely to the same.

In any social media marketing campaign you will do for your business, always go back to the fundamentals and basics. This way, you’re sure to start and finish strong.

Go-to Tools
Because social media marketing is no easy task and one that never sleeps, you will surely need some help. To run your social media marketing campaigns smoothly 24/7, you can utilize various social media marketing tools to make your social media marketing tasks a bit easier and more manageable. With that, here are some of the must-have tools you must try:

• Canva. With this nifty visual content tool, anyone – even those without any background in graphic design – can create capturing graphics. This tool’s drag-and-drop function, templates, and other design elements makes graphic design easy.

• Hootsuite. If you find it hard to manage your social media accounts, you’ll find Hootsuite extremely helpful. With this tool, you can manage and schedule all your social media posts on all your accounts all in one place. This tool has analytics as well.

• CoSchedule. This tool is more than just a tool; it’s a toolset you can use to centralize your entire marketing strategy. CoSchedule offers a plethora of tools for all types of marketing – content, blog management, social media, and a lot more.

• Buzzsumo. One way to practice the law of listening as explained above is through utilizing Buzzsumo. With this tool, you can do content discovery, brand monitoring, influencer marketing, content research and curation, competitor research, etc.

Conclusion
Social media marketing is an inevitable trend that keep’s on growing. If you don’t join in on the trend, you’ll miss out on the great potential it can bring your business. However, joining in on the trend isn’t enough. You have to win it and stand out amongst your competitors. So, give the above tips and tools a try and make your first step in winning at social media marketing.


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7 Ways to Use Marketing Automation to Grow Your Business [GUIDE]

We know that small business owners have no shortage of tasks on their daily to-do lists, and we’re here to help you shorten it even more.

Implementing automated features make attracting and maintaining customers a snap. In this guide, we’ll cover the specific automated steps you can implement for email and social media marketing. Before we start, let’s talk about the top four benefits of automation so you understand why it’s so valuable:

1. Save time
One of the biggest benefits of automation is that it allows you to save lots of time. By setting a few marketing emails on auto-delivery, you won’t have to create and send individual emails every time you need to communicate with your list. If you use an automated platform for social media updates, you can schedule a series of posts at one time.

2. Reach customers in a timely manner
By using automated features, you’ll reach your customers quickly. For example, you can automate a welcome email that is sent 24 hours after a new contact is added to your list. This guarantees that new contacts get valuable information about your business in a timely fashion, even while you sleep.

3. Ability to work ahead
As a small business owner, it’s vital to ‘work ahead’ as much as possible. With automation, you can set up emails and social media posts in advance.

4. Turn prospective customers into paying customers
Automating some of your marketing tasks can help you convert interested customers into paying customers. In fact, a report published by Regalix showed that nearly 86 percent of businesses believe marketing automation is one of the most efficient ways to nurture and manage new leads.

Are you convinced yet? Excellent! Now let’s get down to the nuts and bolts of it all. Here are seven ways you can properly utilize marketing automation:

1. Capture emails through sign up forms
Before setting up automation, we suggest setting up an email sign up form on your business’s website. These simple forms help you collect names and email addresses from interested customers or clients.

The steady stream of new contacts that comes in through this form will give you an authentic list of email addresses to draw from to send emails to. Your efforts to build your email list should be ongoing, and a sign up form is a hassle-free way to keep names coming in with little effort on your part.

VerticalResponse has an email sign up form that you can use. It’s simple to set up and activate, and all of your new contacts go right into your VR account. From there you can automate emails to send out to your new and existing contacts.

If you prefer, you could also use a third-party service to create sign up forms that work as pop ups, sidebars, or sliders on your site.

Consider trying OptinMonster. If you’re using WordPress, ThriveThemes has a plugin you can use to collect customer information. Both of these sites make it easy for small business owners to establish “information collection points” on their websites. There is a cost to use these services, but you don’t need any website or coding experience to get started. 

2. Automate welcome emails
With a sign up form in place, one of the first marketing items you’ll want to automate is your welcome email. Since every new contact receives a welcome email, it makes sense to automate it.

If you decide to use the VerticalResponse sign up form to collect email address, the new contacts are automatically added to your list. You can go into your account, create a welcome email and set it up to deliver the warm greeting within 48 hours. You want to make sure that new contacts receive a welcome email shortly after they sign up for your email list, while their interest is still peaked.

The welcome email should outline the perks of receiving messages from your company and include links that direct customers back to your website.

If you need help creating a welcome email, we have several resources to check out:

10 Examples of Highly Effective Emails
7 Tips to a Stellar Welcome Email
7 Reasons Your Business Needs a Welcome Email 

3. Send a series of event reminders
Let’s say you have an event coming up or a big promotion. You can use automation to set up a series of emails that reminds your audience about it.

For example, when an insurance broker is hosting a day of free consultations, the owner should set up three emails to automatically send to customers. The first email describes the event in full; the second email is a reminder to sign up for a specific time slot before the consultation day is booked. A day before the event, a third email encourages people to take advantage of the few openings left and adds an incentive of free coffee and donuts.

All three of these emails can be created ahead of time and sent over the course of two weeks. All of the emails should include links back to your website where customers can find out more information.
You can apply this same concept to an upcoming sale, a charity event, a customer appreciation event or an appearance at a local trade show. The idea is to set up a series of emails that reminds your audience about a particular event.

4. Treat your loyal customers
Segment your list by pulling out the names of your most loyal customers and develop an automated email campaign that focuses on rewarding them. Consider writing an email that ‘Gives Thanks’ to your repeat customers for their loyalty and offers something in return. Maybe it’s a 10% off coupon, a voucher for a free service, the chance to be the first to try a new product, discounted shipping or some other kind of gift. You can set this email up to go out every other month for six months to encourage your loyal customers to keep buying.

For inspiration, take a look at this email from Ghurka, a leather accessory store, which honors loyal customers.

5. Encourage active customers to buy again
You can also automate a series of emails to entice recent buyers to buy again. If a customer has made a purchase or signed up for a service within the last 2-3 weeks, put them in their own group and prepare to create an automated email series specifically for them.

For example, in the first email you can thank them for the purchase and showcase additional merchandise you have in stock. Here’s an example from Crate&Barrel:



The second email could offer a discount on a similar product or announce the arrival of a new accessory. The second email could also be a gift guide that highlights several of your hottest items.

6. Bring old customers back
Similar to encouraging recent customers to buy again, you should also think about ways to re-engage inactive customers too.

Take a look at your email list and pull out the names of customers who haven’t purchased anything from your business in the past 6-8 months. Create a series of emails that are designed to get them back on your bandwagon.

The first email can simply say, “We miss you” and include a special offer. The second email, which you should send a week later, could contain a survey asking why the customer has strayed. The survey results can also offer valuable insight that you can use to maintain customers in the future.

7. Automate your social posts
With your email automation underway, you can now switch gears to social media automation. If your business uses more than one social site, you can use a social media management tool to automate the process.

Management tools let you schedule posts ahead of time, which drastically reduces the number of times you have to log in, create messages, and post them. With automated tools, you can set aside an hour per week and schedule posts for the entire forthcoming week.

For time-strapped business owners, automation prevents social neglect. After all, you don’t want your customers to get used to a minimally updated Facebook page or sparsely posted tweets.

So, which social media automation tools are the best? There are several options. It’s important to note that all of these apps offer a free plan, so definitely take them for a test drive and see which one fits your business before committing long-term.

HootSuite. This app syncs with several social media platforms including Facebook and Twitter. You can access all of your social accounts from one dashboard.
TweetDeck. If you’re an avid Twitter user, TweetDeck can help you schedule posts and monitor feeds.
IFTTT (If This Then That). For the more advanced social media user, IFTTT is a great option simply because there are more automation features to choose from with this one. As an example, you can easily link it to your business blog, and when a new post is added, a tweet will automatically go out to advertise the new content. You can also turn to content curating platforms. These tools give you a list of content that is relevant to your readers and enables you to share it with little fuss. This way you don’t have to scour your feeds looking for valuable content to share; the search is already done for you.

Swayy and Pocket are good content curation apps to start with. All you need to do is enter a list of general topics that you’d like to see in your feed and you’ll immediately get dozens of content options in your search findings. As you share this content, each platform hones in on your preferences and gives you more specific content that’s tailored to your needs over time. A word of caution
Automated marketing is a fantastic tool for small business owners, but you’ll want to use it in moderation. Not everything can, or should be scheduled in advance. For example, when breaking news happens that’s relevant to your industry, you’ll want to create day-of social media posts and emails. When a new employee comes on board, or you’ve decided to run a last-minute sale, you won’t be able to rely on automation either. Just remember, like any other resource, automation is another tool you can keep on your pegboard and use it as needed.

Share with us on social which parts of marketing you currently automate and how it works for you.


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5 Social Media Management Strategies to Increase Productivity

AS an entrepreneur or business owner, do you often find yourself spending too much time online looking for content to share with your followers?  Or, do you spend a good chunk of time trying to engage your audience?

If you answered yes to either question, you’re not alone. According to a survey, 43% of small business owners spend 6 hours or more on social media, with the vast majority stating that finding content to share being the most time consuming task.

And while social media can get the best of us, creating blog content is also right at the top of the list of time-consuming tasks.

Up to 45% of small business owners spend anywhere from one to three hours creating a blog post while 16% spend even more time than that.

By implementing these five social media management strategies, you’ll save time and help streamline your tasks – giving you the luxury to grow your business and take it to the next level.

1. Curate Content

Content curation, or the process of finding information that is relevant to your audience, can take up a lot of time.

Going from website to website – and reading blog post after blog post – can eat away at your time, making content management extremely time consuming.

To find content quickly, try these two tools.

Pocket

If you find yourself saving bookmarks for every article, video, and image you want to share, you’ll probably end up with hundreds of bookmarks. Or, you might have dozens of emails sent to yourself containing links to articles you want to share later.

There’s no need to do this anymore. Pocket is a tool that saves content in one location. Pocket integrates with your browser so you can save articles with just one click. It also organizes your content based on whether it’s an image, article, or a video.

Pocket is available on Android, iPhone, iPad, and Kindle Fire too, so you can stay synced across multiple platforms.

Once you’ve started to add content to Pocket, you can check out recommended articles based on what you’ve been saving. This is a great way to find related content that you can share, instead of spending all day searching online.

Pocket integrates with over 500 other apps like Twitter, Evernote and Buffer. In addition, once you have a piece of content saved in Pocket, you can add it your Buffer queue, making social sharing a painless task.

Feedly

Feedly is an RSS news aggregator, and there are two ways it can be used to curate content. One way is to simply find an article that you like, and copy the site’s URL into Feedly. That site will then be added to your news feed.

Another way is to let Feedly recommend articles for you. You can enter some of your favorite websites or pick categories that you’re interested in, and Feedly will pull the latest news stories from popular sites around the web.

You can organize the news articles into categories, or collections. This allows you to view all articles relevant to a particular topic such as startups, social media, SEO, or whatever topic you’re interested in.

You can browse through your feed to find articles that you want to share with your audience. Feedly integrates with other apps such as Hootsuite, Buffer, Twitter, LinkedIn, and so on, to allow for easy sharing.

All in all, Feedly is an amazing resource to have in your arsenal when it comes to saving time with content curation.

2. Schedule Posts Ahead of Time

Instead of manually posting your content throughout the day, it’s much more productive to schedule your social media posts ahead of time.

Here are two popular social media scheduling tools to help you out.

Buffer

Buffer is a popular tool that allows you to schedule your social media content. It can also analyze your social profiles and determine the best possible times throughout the day for you to post.

This increases the likelihood of your content being seen by your audience.

Buffer comes with analytics so you can see which of your posts received the most engagement – a feature that can help you build a more solid social media strategy going forward.

Buffer comes in both a free and paid version. The free plan only allows you to schedule up to 10 posts at one time, and you can only post to one social media profile for each supported social media platform.

Buffer’s Awesome Plan allows you to schedule up to 100 posts, and you can post on up to 10 social profiles for each supported social media platform.

This means that if you have multiple Twitter accounts, Buffer will allow you to schedule content that will post under both of your Twitter handles.

You can also install a browser extension that lets you quickly add content to your queue while browsing the web, and is available on Android and iOS too.

While Buffer does allow you to preschedule posts across the more popular social media platforms, it doesn’t currently support Instagram, Reddit, Tumblr, or some of the less popular social sites.

Hootsuite

If your audience is found on other platforms – like Instagram – then you’ll probably benefit more from Hootsuite.

Hootsuite works the same as Buffer; it allows you to schedule social media posts, collaborate as teams, works across multiple social media platforms such as Instagram and Foursquare, and gives detailed analytics of your social media profiles.

Also, Hootsuite has a wide range of free and paid apps that you can integrate into the dashboard to really customize your social sharing.

And if you need content to share, Hootsuite comes with a built-in feature that will suggest content for you.

The only downside to Hootsuite is that, because it offers more, the dashboard is a bit more complicated to learn and isn’t as user friendly. Plus, analytics reports are not included in the price you pay for Hootsuite.

The free version of Hootsuite enables you to use three social profiles, and for up to 50 profiles, the Pro version currently starts at $9.99 with a 30-day free trial.

3. Segment Your Audience

Social media can eat away at your time – from reading feeds and threads to scrolling through Pins and, before you know it, an hour rolls by.

It’s also time consuming trying to sort through your Twitter feed and Facebook timeline. To make things a little less cluttered, try using Twitter lists and Facebook Interests.

Twitter Lists

Twitter lists are considered one of the most underused features of Twitter.

To get started, you create a list and then add specific people to that list.  You can make your list public or private, and setting up a Twitter list is easy.

Instead of trying to keep up with your busy Twitter feed, you can see Tweets from just the people on your list. This makes it easy to retweet or like posts from the people you want to engage with.

Facebook Interests

Facebook Interests work just like Twitter lists – although it’s not as intuitive when it comes to getting set up.

Once logged into Facebook, scroll down your menu until you see Interests. If there’s anything listed under Interests, don’t click it. Instead, to create a list, you want to click on the word Interests.

Click on Add Interests and then Create List. You will then be able to add people and pages to your list.

Now, when you log onto Facebook, you can just go to your Interest List and view posts only from the people and pages you want to follow. This is a huge time saver in the long run.

4. Automate As Much Possible

It goes without saying that the best way to free up your time is to automate as much as possible.

If you schedule social media posts in advance, then you don’t have to worry about updating your social profiles every day.  You can focus on creating more products and services to help grow your business.

But what if you could automate even more of your business? Here are two web automation apps to try out.

IFTTT

IFTTT, which stands for If This Then That, is a web-based program that uses simple cause and effect to perform actions.

IFTTT uses what it calls “recipes” to create a trigger that causes something to happen. For example, when you change your Facebook profile picture (the trigger), your Twitter profile picture could also be updated (the action).

All of this runs in the background – you just create a recipe. IFTTT was originally designed for home use, but can be a powerful business tool as well.

The program has over 240 channels – or apps – that can integrate with IFTTT to create some great recipes.

For example, you can use IFTTT to automatically Tweet a photo you liked on Instagram.

Or you can use IFTTT to cross-post your Twitter updates that included certain hashtags to LinkedIn. If you save an article to read later in Feedly, it will automatically save in Pocket.

You can even use a recipe so that every starred email in Gmail is saved to Evernote. Or whenever an article on the NY Times becomes popular, it gets emailed to you.

The best part is IFTTT is very easy to use and it’s free.

Zapier

Zapier follows the same concept as IFTT, but it’s a bit more complex to learn and is much more business orientated.

Instead of recipes, Zapier calls them “zaps.”

You can also create multipurpose zaps. For instance, you could create a zap so that whenever you gain a new follower, a tweet is automatically sent to them, and then you follow that person back.

So from one trigger (a new follower), you can create two actions (a tweet to them and follow back).

With IFTTT, you’re only allowed one action for every trigger.

But, as was mentioned earlier, Zapier is geared more towards business. They have over 500 apps to help automate not just your social media, but your business as well.

For example, you could create a “zap” that will send out an email (the action) whenever someone unsubscribes from your mailing list (the trigger). Or whenever someone makes a purchase via PayPal, you can automatically add him or her to your mailing list.

You can even automatically send sales receipts to QuickBooks. If your company uses Salesforce or Infusionsoft, you can create zaps to automate tasks in those programs as well.

If you need more than five zaps, or to run more than 100 tasks per month, you’ll have to sign up for a paid version of Zapier.

5. Outsource Time-Consuming Tasks

Many business owners may be hesitant to outsource work, but it’s the best way for you to free up time and work on other projects.

As your business grows, your responsibilities grow as well. Eventually, everything can start to feel overwhelming. This is the point where you need to start outsourcing your work.

You can hire a virtual assistant to find content to share with your audience, and schedule your social media posts. Both Buffer and Hootsuite allow you to add team members to their paid plans – and this gives you the ability to approve every social media post before it goes live to your followers. While this creates work for you initially, it’s a handy feature that can be used when training a new VA.

And when it comes to content creation, if you’re not in the business of creating content, consider hiring someone who is – a professional writer. Content writers can create and curate content for you, freeing up valuable time and helping you grow your blog and business.

Wrapping It Up

As a small business owner, your primary job is to focus on tasks that can help grow your business – work on your business, not in your business.

But if you currently find yourself working in your business, making that transition can be difficult.

Having an active social presence is almost a necessity for businesses these days, but it can often consume a lot of your time. Instead of wasting precious time trying to stay on top of your social media content, you should rely on tools, automation and outsourcing to help streamline your day.

Use apps like Feedly and Pocket to find and save potential articles you can share with your audience. Use Buffer or Hootsuite to schedule your social media posts – freeing up the rest of your day, or week.

Next, try Twitter’s underrated List functionality to prioritize viewing updates from only the people you’re interested in. And finally, automate your business logic with Zapier or IFTTT, and outsource any tasks you find too time-consuming.

Feeling a bit overwhelmed at the prospect of ALL of the above? Well, we have a great all-in-one solution to get you started. OctoSuite is a complete social media management and mass automation tool, designed to schedule and post updates for you.

You’ll have more time to focus on what really matters – growing your business and taking it to the next level.

What more could you want in a time saving strategy?

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