You can find Part 1 of this article here.
Use software to automate your social media
With artificial intelligence on the rise, you’ll want to make sure not to program yourself out of a job or automate yourself out of relevance. Yet, if used correctly, automation can be liberating.
Hootsuite and Sprout Social are just two of the many tools that can help you manage and schedule your posts. Each of these platforms has a plethora of instructional videos to assist with connecting all your accounts. WordPress, Facebook and YouTube allow you to schedule posts, meaning you could potentially plan many weeks’ worth of content before heading out on a work trip or vacation. You can even use IFTTT and Zapier to auto-upload new photos from your phone to Dropbox, send alerts to your email, and schedule and post new Instagram posts to specific Pinterest boards. Just make sure not to schedule too many posts in one day—the trick here is to come across as consistent, not spammy.
Use Mixmax to schedule and track emails, and also try LinkedHelper, a Chrome Extension that lets you automate outreach, make connections, and send messages to people on LinkedIn based on certain search criteria. You may also want to try Loom, a free Chrome extension that makes it easy to record short videos of your screen and processes. Loom helps you examine your own processes internally to see if there are steps that could be removed or improved upon. The extension can also help you explain and document processes to admins.
For tactics like following and unfollowing people on Twitter and Instagram in order to get them to follow you back, and some other engagement duties—such as liking and commenting on posts on your behalf and responding and sending DMs based on templates—can be delegated to admins.
While there are tools and bots that can handle these actions for you, many of them are blocked by social networks. For instance, until July 2018, anyone could create a follow and unfollow app on Twitter with Tweetbuzz, but now you would need to be an approved Twitter developer in order to do so. A service like Crowdfire, however, allows you to copy followers of someone else on Twitter. Captivate is an app that does basically the same thing on Instagram. If you are already following too many people, you can use an extension like Twitter Unfollow All to mass unfollow.
Use virtual admins
Time is money. Time also helps achieve work-life balance. Hiring an admin can help you free up more time to live, especially if you first put in a little elbow grease by determining specific tasks to complete and processes to follow. Upwork, Freelancer and Toptal are all companies where you can find freelancers from anywhere in the world who have social media, admin or copywriting experience. It is best if you hire someone in the same country as you, so there isn’t too much of a language or time barrier. You’ll want to interview potential admins and check samples of their work to ensure you’re on the same page as far as quality. Running a short time period test with the admins can be a quick way to gauge their capabilities.
Prices for hiring an admin vary. For example, hiring someone to schedule and manage your social media posts for four hours a week at $17 an hour might set you back about $300 a month.
For your outreach, first create a shared Google Doc that contains the templates for the messages you want to send to potential customers or influencers, as well as a Google Doc that has template responses for the different sorts of questions you generally receive. You may need to refine and add to these documents as time goes on and new questions arise. Put them into Google Docs and share with your admin for easy access.
You can also give parameters for the type of people you’d like your admins to send outreach messages to, as well as give instructions about how to search for people to add to your lists. For example, they can send 10 DMs a day to specific audiences on Instagram or Twitter or send outreach from your LinkedIn account in bulk—all according to the title and function parameters you lay out for them.
The best online content is always about a conversation rather than dictation, and there should be organic communication with followers of your accounts. You can have your new admin like and comment on certain posts for 20 minutes here and 20 minutes there. Google Sheets is great for tracking outreach and creating content calendars. All of those can go in the same shared Google Drive folder, too.
Using this template, have your admin schedule three to five posts per week per platform, making sure to include hashtags, copy, and time of post along with the content. After you’ve reviewed and approved the calendar, your admin can use one of the platforms you’ve already set up—Hootsuite, for example—to schedule your posts for the entire month.
Don’t spend your next vacation checking emails, interacting online, and sharing photos. Instead, upload your photos to the shared Google Drive folder your admin has access to, then make sure to enjoy yourself rather than posting and commenting about how much you are enjoying your vacation. Try to live in the moment and let someone else handle the posts and responding for you.
Another note about your Google Drive folder: It is best to organize your media using subfolders so that your admin can quickly find content. At the very least, you’ll want to build a library of images and videos that can be used in future content calendars and have an organized system of rules and processes so that you have already set your admin up to succeed.
Authenticity is overrated
Although it’s true that the average American adult spends over 11 hours a day interacting with media, remember: you don’t have to be average. Rather than spending your days staring a screen to curate the lame online you, automate your social media presence so you have more time for rewarding, value-generating activities.
