Social Media is something most everyone needs to do, but not many have the time to do.

Sure, you can go hire someone to do all of your social media tasks, but that might cost an arm and a leg.

Surprisingly, there are easier ways to get your social media platforms progressing without spending hours and hours each day tweeting and posting. Here are a few little steps to take that won’t take much time and will surely impact your social presence.

Automate Your Content

Automating your content is an easy and fast way to get posts out on every social platform, without having to actually log in each day to post. Obviously with automating content, there are a few rules to follow:

1. Make sure the scheduled out content isn’t old news. You want the content to be relevant whenever it’s posted. You also may want to post evergreen content. This is content that will never become old. Evergreen content is something that should be continuously scheduled out and have in a permanent rotation.
2. You also don’t want all of the posts to be about yourself/your website. Posting things from other reliable sources is a great way to show your followers and those brands that you don’t only care about what you’re posting, but you also value others’ knowledge.
3. Mix up what you post and the times you post it. You don’t want to post five blogs on that same concept in less than an hour, right?
4. In times of tragedy, political disasters, or other instances along those lines, you can go in and pause your content from scheduling out. This is important because you don’t want to post content that may be taken as disrespectful or rude in the time of tragedy. This is an easy way to lose your audience and make your business look bad.

This may seem like a lot of work, but there are tools to make scheduling out content extremely easy on your part. Here are a couple of great tools that are free or low cost for scheduling content:

Buffer: Buffer lets you schedule out content to your social media channels with just a click of a button. It’s easy and affordable.  With Buffer, it picks out the times for you, but you can go in and mix up your articles for when you want to publish them.

Edgar: On Edgar, you save updates to its database, and tell it what social networks you want to schedule it on. You save your content in certain categories, and they post it to your library. With the categories, you can go in and create a schedule for each category. For example, if you have a category called “blog posts”, then you go to your library and tell Edgar to schedule out one something from the category “blog posts” every Wednesday at 5pm.

Hootsuite: Hootsuite is another platform that allows you to save content and schedule it out. With Hootsuite, all of your social media accounts are in one place, where you can keep an eye on every piece of content going out or coming in.

Scheduling out content takes some time, but at the end of the day the time you save with automating content will lead to more time for customer engagement.

If you need help or just don’t know how to get started, check out my free social media quick-start guide and get step-by-step instructions to launch your social media campaign today.

Adding Social Icon/Buttons Everywhere

An easy way to put your social media out there while saving time is your social plugins. Anywhere and everywhere you have some sort of content or product, you should have your social icons on that page or post. You want people to be able to share your content quickly and not have to look around to find out how they can share something. The easiest way to do this is look around your site and figure out where people might want to share the content on the page, and add your social buttons. This is a fast way to get easy social media engagement while also getting your content and products out there. The more people that are able to share your content the more people that will come and view your content, which could lead to sales!

Create a Newsletter

Creating a newsletter is one of the simplest ways you can get your content out there while engaging with your audience. You can schedule out content for once a week or once a month, as long as people are getting content from you on a regular schedule.

Tag Your Content

Wherever it’s possible, tag your content! Whether it be adding tags in your blog post or hashtags on Twitter and Instagram, the more you tag the more attention your brand receives.

Another great way to bring attention to your brand without trying that hard is by tagging certain people whose content you’re sharing or if you’ve done an interview with them. When you tag people, they will more than likely share the post they’re tagged in to their audience, which would bring more recognition to your brand.

Just these four simple steps will save you a lot of time on your social media. Automating your content, adding your icons everywhere and anywhere, and creating a newsletter will bring in people from all different social platforms to your content and your social media profiles.

About the Author

Amber Hanke is a certified social media & community manager for Red Canoe Media, a digital marketing agency based in St Louis with clients nationwide.  Amber’s course, The 6 Week Social Media Challenge helps business owners and marketing managers learn how to do their own social media through a series of online video tutorials.