We all know how important it is to be active on social media to build our brands, network, promote our classes and send traffic to our websites but what nobody seems to talk about is just how time-consuming it all is.
When I first started my studio I would spend countless hours each week scheduling social media posts. Every Sunday I would put on a movie (or 2 or 3!), sit down on the couch and schedule my social media posts for the week ahead. With around 2 Instagram posts, 2 Facebook Group posts and 4 updates on my Facebook page each day, I would easily spend 3-5 hours on this.
Add networking, replying to comments and answering messages into the mix and most of my time was being spent on social media.
Whilst what I was doing was time-consuming, it was working. My traffic from social media was growing daily, my email list was growing each week and I was getting more and more new enquiries. But maintaining that level of effort each week was impossible so I set out to find ways to save time!
Today I’m going to share my top time-saving tips with you.
1. PLAN YOUR CONTENT AHEAD OF TIME
One of the main things that helps me save time scheduling social media now is knowing exactly what I’m going to be posting.
There’s nothing like a last-minute blind panic to slow you down. Trust me, when you rush, you make mistakes and everything takes twice as long! Planning ahead also means that you can batch tasks which saves more time.
Knowing what you’re going to publish and when, on your blog might not seem like it’s going to save you any time when it comes to social media but anything that helps you get organised and plan ahead is going to seriously cut down on the time content creation takes.
The same goes for promotions so plan out any launches, flash sales, promos, etc. out for the week or even the month ahead of time.
2. USE TEMPLATES FOR IMAGES
If you’re looking for a way to significantly save time when it comes to creating and scheduling social media content, templates are it!
Every social media platform requires different dimensions for graphics and you’ll usually want to create multiple variations for each platform. This means for each event, workshop, promotion …whatever you’re featuring, you could be creating around 10 different images/graphics.
That’s a lot of images and it could take you hourssssss to create them all. But, because I use templates, it takes me about 20 minutes to create them all.
I’ll be completely honest, it took me a few hours to create all of the templates initially but now that I have them, they save me loads of time in the long-run. Now each time I need to create new graphics for a blog post, I just have to log into my Canva account, make a copy of the templates and update them! Simple!
We offer a range of social media image templates each month designed specifically for studio owners which you can check out here.
But for June only we're giving away 10 of our most popular templates for FREE! Click the link below to claim yours today!
3. USE A SCHEDULING TOOL THAT HAS AN EVERGREEN FEATURE
Scheduling your social media posts ahead of time will allow you to batch the content creation which will save you time in the long run but I really want to talk about creating and scheduling evergreen content as it’s been a complete gamechanger for me!
There are a few social media scheduling tools that offer this but my absolute favourite is CoSchedule.
We all know how quickly social media newsfeeds move and, as a result, how important it is to share your content multiple times and consistently.
With CoSchedule you can write a post once and select automatically loop your post over and over again. No need to rewrite your post each time you want to share it! Perfect when you're promoting registrations or special events such as mid and end-of-year concerts.
You can even choose how long you want between the posts, you can choose a set number of times that post is shared or select a date after which the post expires. How cool is that?
Once your posts are in the evergreen queue, you just need to add new content for time-sensitive things when you create new content, or launch a new class or promotion.
Again, this is one of those things that can take a bit of time to get set up, especially if you have lots of content and promotions that you need to create evergreen content for already, but it’s a one-and-done thing and saves a SERIOUS amount of time each week.
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