There are a lot of great apps and software tools available today.
Many help people save time with various tasks. In the marketing world, there are a lot of these tools that aim to save time and effort for all kinds of marketing activities.
But while it’s great living in the “There’s an app for that…” era, it also leads to a lot of apps that waste a lot of time. And the whole point of things is to be more efficient.
So it becomes a matter of both accepting and welcoming new apps while also questioning their actual value. In doing that, it’s often easier to “manually” do something like social media sharing without using software.
Here is one way to do it…
Step #1. Calendar Reminders
One of the best inventions is the daily calendar. A list of items that you do every day. I’m a fan of listing out the day’s to do list. I like keeping it consistent week to week. And a big key for me is auditing the schedule every six months. I make readjustments based on results, needs, priorities, etc. Then I dive back into the day-to-day work.
I also like to leave some excess time that isn’t scheduled. This allows for surprise tasks that seem to always popup. And when they don’t happen…I have some free time to do what I want. Including more work.
For social media content sharing or scheduling, I simply schedule times each day for sharing. If you want to share 4 times a day, for example, you can set a reminder for 7am, 10am, 1pm and 4pm. Once you get in the groove of sharing, this will take about ~5 minutes at most during each of those times.
But setting the tasks on your calendar ensures that you’re going to do them. As long as you don’t let yourself begin to slip.
Step #2. Content to Share
For sharing social media content, native content typically gets the most engagement. This is the content meant to live within the platform. It’s meant for users to consume it within the software or app and never leave. Just go from one content piece to the next. Sharing, engaging, commenting and all those things.
So the best way to go is to create unique content specifically for social media. Video, audio and text. Whatever is preferred for the platform or whatever you prefer because that will likely lead to you creating the most content, which is how you learn to create the best content.
But another option is to curate content or to reuse and repurpose content you’ve already created. A blog post can often turn into 3-5 pieces of native text content for social media. A 10-minute video can turn into 1-2 clips that you can share on social. The same with a podcast clip.
One way to gather this information is to create a process for quickly searching for and then using the content on social. Creating a fast process for this allows for efficiency. You can search for a keyword on your blog, for example, see a list of posts, click on a few, scan and then select a snippet to share.
Step #3. Creating A Content Queue
A better way to find the content quick is to schedule time each week to queue content for your scheduled sharing times. You can do this usually with a simple spreadsheet or something similar. Even if it’s video or audio, but especially with text.
Set aside 30 minutes each week to identify your ~20 pieces of content to share. Search for blog posts, scan then and then copy and paste the snippets into your spreadsheet.
Then when you get a reminder to share content throughout the days and weeks, you have content ready to go. Just copy and paste again and you’re good to go. It can take less than a minute.
Conclusion
Sometimes we like to make things more complicated than they need to be. With social media software, you’re often going through this same process. But instead of posting directly to the social platform, you’re uploading to the software first. That’s adding an extra step to the process. Sure, it might save you the time of posting at scheduled times, but I kind of like this quick check-in. It gives you time to see what content is getting engagement and you can take that info into the next item you share.
Maybe software saves you a little time. I know there are some great tools out there. But in a life filled with tools, sometimes it’s better to do things the old fashioned way.