Social Media Management Tips for the Busy Small Business Owner

As a small business owner, it probably feels like you are juggling a million responsibilities. It’s only a matter of time before you have to start dropping certain tasks. Social media management is often one of the first to-do list items to be neglected.

I totally get it – I’ve worked as a social media manager + graphic designer for years. Sometimes I struggle to update my own Instagram accounts because I’m so busy designing and posting for others. #designerprobs

You’re feeling stressed because you want to engage with your audiences on social media, but your time is limited. As a new business owner, you aren’t yet at a point where you can delegate the task to an employee. Don’t lose hope – keep reading, and I’ll share some social media management advice that has helped me.

Figure out where your audience is spending time, and focus your efforts there.

You don’t have to do #allthethings just because everyone else is. The way I see it, you have two options.

1: Start a Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Pinterest because you feel like you have to. Or, 2: Do some research about your target audience. Let’s say that you find out that most of your engagement and website referrals come from Instagram and Facebook.

Wouldn’t you rather run 2 accounts that are engaging with loyal customers, than have 4+ mediocre accounts? Spreading yourself too thin is never helpful, especially when you are wasting time with platforms your audience won’t show up on.

Plan your content.

Having a plan when it comes to social media marketing will help you consistently deliver quality content to your audience.

This means you have to set aside time to plan, but it will ultimately save you time in the long run. I plan using a simple content calendar. If you need help setting one up, check out my tutorial on How to Create a Social Media Content Calendar in Trello.

Create & Schedule your posts ahead of time.

Once you have a plan, take the next step. Like with planning, you’ll have to actually set aside time to sit down and do it. This is something that I struggle with. I’ve found that with better time management, I am able to block out some time to get it done.

One thing that I love about scheduling posts is that you can stay ahead, instead of always feeling behind. Even better, you can spend your daily time on social media engaging others.

Here are my favorite content schedulers for each platform:

1. Instagram: Planoly. I’ve tried several different schedulers for Instagram. I like Planoly the best because it’s free, easy to use, and very visual. You can even create drafts in a grid-form before adding them to the actual scheduling queue.
2. Facebook: The Publishing Tools built-into Facebook. There are plenty of schedulers for Facebook out there, and for the typical Facebook post they work great. However, I’ve found that the publishing and scheduling tools inside Facebook allow me to have more customization over the content. This is especially true for videos.
3. Twitter: Buffer. Buffer is a simple + straightforward way to schedule tweets, and the baseline plan is free. Buffer even suggests times to post and alerts you when your queue is empty.

While I have the free version of these schedulers, it is important to note that Planoly, Buffer, and many of the other schedulers out there offer paid versions with more features. One of the biggest bonuses of paying is being able to post to more than one or two platforms from your account (ex: posting to Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter).

I recommend that new business owners start with free plans, and wait until your social media grows to move to the paid versions.

Final Thoughts

I’m definitely not perfect, and I’m constantly learning about this ever-changing topic of social media. However, these tips have helped me improve the social media strategies of my clients & my own business. I hope they help you, too!