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Social media is a “spend 30 minutes a day” concept.
No really, it is.
People find themselves spending most of their day on Facebook because they feel the need to constantly engage, post, interact, and communicate with their audience.
Don’t believe me – take the challenge, install RescueTime right now and run it for a week.
After one week, come back to this article and let me know how it went. But I digress, the point is the time spent on social media is less time spent with clients and/or doing what you love.
Want to know a secret? You do not have to be on it all the time (or at all if you hire a Virtual Assistant …wink wink).
Facebook Profile vs. Facebook Page
Facebook views the value of your personal profile and the value of your page differently.
Money can’t be made off your profile; therefore, Facebook views you as a valued asset when it comes to your participation. It wants to see you engage with others and will reward your commenting, liking, and sharing by showing the posts you interact with more frequently in your feed; however, Facebook views your Page as a cash cow.
When it comes to a Page, Facebook does not care for constant posting and sharing because organic reach and engagement does not create a profit for them.
In fact, the more you post on your Facebook page, the more your content is suppressed.
Seriously, if you post to your page more than twice a day on Facebook (or too closely to one another), your reach actually goes down!
They need you to purchase Facebook Ads.
In 2017, Facebook made $39.9 BILLION in ad revenue. Their bread and butter is your desire to get in front of your Target Audience.
Story Time (feel free to skip down)!
True story: I have a client that I have been working with for a while on social media. Her growth has been great and I monitor it very closely. Normally, she would have me post three times day (all original content – two quote graphics and a blog/article share). Suddenly her engagement plummeted. I looked at her insight and attempted to adjust her posting times. I reviewed her target audience data and tried to cater to a different demographic (her audience was shifting to a younger crowd). Nothing was working. Everything I had ever done to grow her page wasn’t helping, it was hindering. So – I decide to just post twice a day – once in the morning and once at night. BAM! Her reach tripled! It was that simple – less was more. Her engagement went up, she even began appearing on my personal Facebook feed. She was so excited about the increase that she began engaging on Instagram more to see if she could ramp up follower there. Engagement plummeted again. I took another look and saw that 1) her Instagram posts were showing up frequently on her Facebook page and 2) my late night post was too close to her final Instagram post time before she went to bed. I let her know that while she could (and should) post to Instagram frequently, only let one go over to Facebook in the evening and I would stick with the morning post. Reach bounced back, engagement went up, and her page has been on fire ever since.
Does This Go For Everyone?
Short answer – no.
Some social media platforms prefer that you post more, not less.
Twitter recommends that you actually post up to 5 times a day every single day.
LinkedIn – no more than 10 times a week and preferably on Tuesday, Wednesdays, and Thursdays.
Pinterest – a whopping 10 pins every day (would seriously recommend Tailwind to make that a lot easier).
Instagram is a beast within itself. It only recommends 1 to 2 times a day, every day but that is more for engagement since 1) you cannot put clickable links in your posts (you can in your stories!) and 2) your posts can’t be shared in the same manner as Facebook and Twitter (you can only tag someone).
Yes, there are several apps that will allow you to repost content in Instagram but I have also seen accounts shut down for this so if you decide to use something like Repost, be careful. It is easy to be shut down and a nightmare to be reinstated.
Delegate the Hard Part
So circling back, if you should only spend up to 30 minutes a day on social media – how do you create content, post content, and engage within that short window?
Automate!!
Some people believe that you must organically post your content throughout the day to increase your reach.
What do you think Facebook Insights is for?
All the data you need is right there.
You can see when people interact with your page the most (day and time), what posts they enjoyed the most, and what content they like to share.
There are so many programs out there!
Want something free – try Buffer or Hootsuite (you can schedule up to 30 posts with a free account on up to three platforms).
Paid – SmarterQueue, Hootsuite Pro, CoSchedule, or MeetEdgar just to name a few.
If you have Instagram, I would strongly encourage you stick with a service that allows you to post directly versus using a third party app (Socialbee.io, Later, or Planoly for example).
What Do I Know?
Personally, I am a strong believer in “…those who can’t, teach”.
I am Virtual Technical Assistant and I work all…the…time.
My client load, while insane, is manageable but this leaves very little time for anything else.
You may look at my social media platforms and think, really – you have this many likes/followers and you have the audacity to tell me how to do social media?
Yes! Why?
I spend all of my time growing my CLIENTS that I don’t need to spend time on mine.
I don’t gather new clients from social media, I gather them from referrals because my work speaks for itself BUT I do believe in paying it forward so if I have the knowledge, why not share it?
Now that you know when to post, what do you post? Stay tuned for Part 2 (or else these would be novels!)
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
Delegation Isn’t a Dirty Word
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