Have you ever felt overwhelmed by social media? Have you struggled organising your time in order to handle your social media activities?

Social media is just too much, right? Too many posts, too many people, too many questions, too many tweets, too much noise, too much to do to go through it all. And you only have a few hours a day to get everything done…

Fear not, it’s not just you, it’s almost everyone.

The past few months with my move to a new country and my new job have been super busy for me, so I have also felt overwhelmed. What helped me was HubSpot’s very simple formula that you can use to make the most of your time on social media on a daily basis. And because it’s worked so well for me, so I decided to share it with you today. Hopefully, this will give you a daily structure of how to more efficiently handle your social media activities every day.  

How to Manage Social Media: Four Key Things to Do

1. Review what’s working for ca. 3 minutes: make informed decisions for future content based on your previous social messages that have performed well in terms of clicks, shares, retweets and comments.
2. Schedule your social messages for ca. 5 minutes: in line with your content and social media strategy, schedule relevant social media posts on your networks of choice for the week or month ahead, mixing up your own content and curating other’s content. You can even re-share a post that has performed really well – just make sure you change the copy.
3. Engage with those who have interacted with you for ca. 7 minutes: social media, as the name says, is about being social, so spend some time going over the comments people have left on your posts or your channels and responding to that in a timely manner. Remember that social media is about two-way conversations so show people that you care and are interested in what they have to say, and do so quickly because social media is real-time, it’s about now. Also, don’t forget to follow back and say ‘thank you’ to people who have shared your content.
4. Monitor what others are saying for ca. 5 minutes: listening on social media is key so that you know what people are saying about you, what’s happening in your industry, among competitors and among your audiences in order to make informed decisions about your social strategy and content plan. Customers might be asking questions or filing complaints, or simply giving you some constructive feedback to help you adjust your social activities accordingly or, going a step further, even fix or create new products and services.

Now that all sounds very manageable, right? It’s even less than 20 minutes and it shouldn’t be a problem to squeeze that into your daily schedule. One thing you can do here is to designate a specific time of day and put a 20-minute block in your calendar and then tick of each of these four key things to manage social manage daily.

Going a step further, here are some examples of actionable items by HeroX for the various social networks you can use to fit into your 20 minutes of social media management a day:

How do you manage social media? Do you have any useful tips that save you time?