I’m Christine Sinclair, and before opening Chreil Consultancy and training I spent 14 years working in my wedding boutique, managing its sales and marketing. While working on marketing I realised we needed to incorporate social media within our marketing strategy, and by using social media we would increase our brand awareness and more engagement for potential customers.

However, one of the most challenging aspects of social media for small businesses is not having enough time. My focus today is to help small businesses improve and utilise social media effectively and still have time to work on other aspects of their business.

Managing social media is a commitment and a challenge, however social medial can be managed efficiently without spending too much time posting content. Once you have found the methods and established a way of working, the rest of the time you can spend listening to your customers effectively.

There are two main tips that can be adopted to improve social media time management.

Plan Ahead with Scheduling

Spending some time planning your posts, creating a calendar and executing your social media strategy will help to save time in the long run. The first time you create a content calendar will take a while. And then you can plan two hours per week to keep a set of scheduled posts for the future. This will help to manage your time and you will be able to build an audience with out having to take too much time away from building your business. This will also prevent you from spamming your follower’s feed with too many posts and it will also help you to give your audience the right contents relevant to your business. And in doing so you can schedule your contents and maintain a steady flow of content throughout the week.

Use Auto-Scheduling to Promote Content

Another advantage is to auto-schedule your contents and other contents you find on the web by using auto-scheduling tools. You can also use auto-schedule in addition to your regular manual scheduling which we mention above.

Some of My Favourite Social Media Scheduling Tools

Most social media platforms have their own auto-scheduling tools, or you can use third party tools like:
Hootsuite – This allows you to schedule, auto-schedule and managing all your social media platform all in one place.
IFTTT - This allows you to automate a broad range of activities.
Post Planner - This helps automate the sharing of content to your Facebook pages.

Christine is from Chreil Consultancy and Training – email her at christine@chreil.co.uk to find out more about their services. For more industry opinions, read why one bridalwear shop manager has banned photography from her boutique.