Hi and welcome to the Savvy Social Podcast! Today’s episode is all about how to manage social media without it taking over your life.

Before we dive in, I wanted to remind you to join our free Facebook group called the Savvy Social Crew. Inside, we talk all things social media and business building. Plus each Friday, I share a short, live training all about social media. This past week, I talked about how to use other people’s content, specifically when it comes to user generated content.

Join the group and the conversation over at SavvySocialCrew.com.

Now, I don’t know about you, but I find it very easy to fall into the trap of endless social media scrolling. Does anyone else feel this way? Sometimes, it’s all too easy to get caught up in what’s going on without using social media tools to our advantage.

Organize Your Content

My first tip is to get organized! Make sure that you have a strategy when it comes to what to post on what day. Decide on some branding elements and stick with those. Perhaps write them down in a document so you’ll know what to use each time.

By organizing your content, you’re removing the decision fatigue. Have you guys heard about decision fatigue?

I found a great definition of what decision fatigue is from a Fast Company article: “Decision fatigue is the deterioration of our ability to make good decisions after a long session of decision making. In other words, the more decisions you need to make, the worse you’re going to be at weighing all the options and making an educated, research-backed choice.”

Any way you can remove the amount of decisions you make in a day, the better. So when it comes to social media, create a graphic template and stick with it. Eliminate that decision fatigue as much as possible.

Use Automation

There are several ways you can use automation to save you tons of time on social media. But a word of warning, there’s a good way to do it and a not so good way to do it!
I want you to focus on saving time without eliminating the human side of social media. The reason we use social is because we want to connect with other humans, not robots. I’ll give you a two examples of when to use automation and when not to use automation:

When not to use automation: having a robot randomly post thumbs up emojis on as many Instagram pictures as possible. This is terrible because it comes off as a robot which makes you look like you didn’t care enough to actually leave a comment. You had to have a robot leave some lame emoji for you. Not cool.

>When to use automation: having a message automatically share to anyone who messages you on Facebook. For example, my husband and I are looking to get tattoos and one shop we messaged on Facebook had an message that automatically answered our question which was when are they next accepting bookings. It didn’t feel icky! In fact, it felt smart because they’re prepared and they’re showing professionalism online.

Some of my favorite automation tools are: Recurpost and Tailwind.

Repurpose Content

One thing that I see many business owners miss out on is repurposing content. Find ways to re-use content that you’ve already created.

You could turn a blog post into 10 social media posts. You could turn a podcast into a video post. You could re-use a Facebook live video as Instagram Stories content. Get creative with it.

One thing I share with my students is to create one core piece of content for the week or month, and base all of your social media content off of that.

For example, if you have a blog post sharing 5 ways to keep your dog cool this summer. One post could be a question asking your audience how they keep their pets cool. Another post could share a fun fact about keeping dogs cool. Another post could feature one of the ways you listed in your blog. You could host a live Facebook video talking about how to keep your dog cool in the summer. You could also create an infographic featuring 5 ways to keep your dog cool this summer.

By repurposing your content, you’re lowering your decision fatigue but you’re also opening the door to leading conversation back to your main piece of content. You’re allowing yourself the opportunity to remind people why you’re really here on social media.

Post Content That Has Historically Done Well

My last tip for today is to post content that has done wall. Was there a promotional post that sold a bunch of product? Did you ask a question that got a ton of responses? Post it again!

I like to use this strategy when I go on vacation. I’ll look back through my posts and see what did well 6 months to a year ago and I’ll post the exact same image and the exact same caption. I promise you, no one notices.

Use this advice sparingly. You don’t want an account full of the same content repeated over and over again, but it’s a great way to save you some time, especially if you’re about to take time off. You could even entitle the posts as “from the archives” or something if that works for you.

I’ll even do this with posts that didn’t do well. If there was something I was proud of that didn’t get the attention I wanted it too, I’ll wait a few months and post it again.
As always, my advice is to focus on quality and consistency over quantity. If all you can commit to is one post a week, do that! Don’t worry about getting in a ton of posts because some guru told you to. Do what you can but do it consistently. And use the things I’ve talked about today to help you maximize that one thing you can do.

About onlinedrea

Andréa Jones is a social media strategist who works with lifestyle brands to build their online presence through targeted social media and content marketing solutions. She's also the founder of SavvySocialSchool.com - a membership community with everything you need to achieve visibility, growth, and engagement on social media.