How to create a Social Habit

Spend less time on social media, for better results

Have you been thinking about your social media, but not doing it? Are you often on the back foot when it comes to planning? Are you posting great content, just not consistently?

These are the concerns I hear the most from business owners. They know social media is an important engagement and positioning tool, but there’s too much to learn, do and create… so not much happens.

The Social Habit

The goal is to create a social habit. A habit is a regular practice or discipline. Like brushing your teeth, it becomes a natural thing you regularly do – and you know it has long term benefits.

Equally your social media requires discipline and regular focus. Your consistency will reward you with engaged clients and a growing brand awareness that in time will lead to sales and referrals. Systems set up well will create a weekly rhythm and routine.

3 simple steps to start your Social Habit

1. Set up a system to scan

You don’t have to be the one who creates all the content; you can share other’s people content to add to your weekly content plan. It has the double benefit of showing how well read you are. Let’s look at some systems.

Set up a Google Alert

• Go to Google and find Google Alerts.
• If you need to open a Gmail or Google account, it is worth it – and free.
• Enter in the keywords from your ‘What you’re known for’ section as separate google alerts. e.g. “social media,” “brand marketing,” “entrepreneur” “disruption”
• Click on the Settings symbol and set up a daily or weekly email digest. Each day or week you’ll receive an email that will send you the information scanned from the web.
• This is a great way to get Google to find content for you and then you can save those in Evernote or share directly.

 Set up a News aggregator and create a daily email

• Why browse 10 news channels when you can get the news sent to you. This is slightly more complex, but you can use a ‘news aggregator’ to send you all the updates in a daily email.
• I like Feedly or Feedspot, and here are some other suggestions you can try: com

2. Set up a system to Store

Store content in a library: I like to use Evernote

• Have you got an Evernote account?
• It’s a brilliant place to store images and articles like your own personal library.
• You can create ‘notebooks’ or ‘folders’ on the topics that you want to collect content about.
• Then when you scan articles, images, quotes, etc on the web you can add them to the notebooks on Evernote with ease.
• When browsing on your phone there is a simple button you can push to share it to Evernote. Here are tips and tutorials about how to use it: evernote.com

3. Set up a system to schedule

There are more scheduling tools then you can imagine, but I’ve included a few of my favourites. You can schedule your posts across multiple platforms and ahead of time. This will be a big factor in creating consistency on social. I believe consistency beats content every time. Here are some scheduling tools that I like.

Buffer 

Buffer is fairly simple and free. If you’re starting out and don’t want to pay, this is a good tool to get you going. You can post across multiple platforms and it’s easy to create your posts. It gives you tips on the best time to schedule. It has a handle tool where you can “rebuff” (i.e. repost) the most popular posts across platforms. The analytics are easy to understand and clear. It sends you reminders when you need to top up your queues.

Coschedule

I love Coschedule for its simplicity. I always recommend this to clients who don’t want the fuss of learning a fancy platform. It gives you a calendar view with an easy drag and drop feature to change the content across each day. You can easily post a image, web link or text post across all social platforms. It’s great to use with others (like a virtual assistant or copywriter) as it has a draft and approve feature. It integrates beautifully with your blog post on wordpress and allows you to schedule multiple social posts in the future. It also has great analytics and you can see which posts and blog posts rate well with your clients. The only catch is that you do need to pay with a monthly fee. I think it’s worth it – but you can check out the 30-day free trial for yourself.

Hootsuite

Hootsuite is better suited to those who are looking for the next level of social media management. They allow you to post across platforms like the rest, but they also allow you to search and listen. You can search on key terms, or mentions. And you can have a number of columns open so you can be actively monitoring your channels and others. They allow you to automatically post from RSS feeds (which is where you can automatically post from Blogs or news channels that you trust). You can use both of them quite well for free, and then have paid options with more features; e.g. you can use it as teams, go in to more detailed lead generation etc.

ABOUT KIRRYN ZERNA

Kirryn Zerna has worked with large and small businesses to create remarkable brand communications for over a decade, and now she builds that capability into the organisations that she works with. She combines her deep experience of corporate communications and copy writing with the latest research of social media management to deliver a tailored approach for her clients. Find out more: www.kirrynzerna.com

Want to spend less time on social and get better results? 

Businesses and leaders who want to fast track setting up their social media (so they will post great content consistently) can join the Stand Out on Social 1-day workshop in Sydney on Friday, 28 April. You’ll experience a 1 day immersive workshop with follow-up online coaching program. To make it easy, each person who registers will receive a professional photograph to be taken on the day to immediately load up as your profile picture. Can’t make it Sydney? You can pre-register for a Stand Out on Social Bootcamp which is an online coaching program over 4 weeks. Go to kirrynzerna.com/workshop