If you’re a small business owner, you may be going away at some stage over the summer. As wonderful as summer holidays are, they also create a degree of trepidation as regards your business.
Finding the correct balance between escaping work when away and also maintaining some degree of control and ensuring everything is working well can be hard. As you full well know, social media can take hours and needs regular attention. However, you will still want a break of some sort – so how best to partially automate social media when away to ensure things are ticking over – we take a look.
Quality not Quantity
The key to getting some time away from social is down to first deciding on a quality not quantity philosophy. One great piece whether created or shared by you is worth ten average pieces in the social media sphere.
Content
Finding good content for curation and channelling it to one place can be easily achieved with a little organisation prior to you going away. The likes of Feedly and Trap.it among others are great feeds for finding worthy content.
XYDO is also a good app for personal curation and allows you to find personalised content that is relevant to your business and worthy of sharing with your audiences. Set a couple of these apps up before you head for warmer climes and finding content worthy of sharing should be a lot easier.
Automation
There are a number of fantastic tools out there that can make for excellent additions and are fantastic for automation purposes. Our own favourite Bufferapp allows you to line up those sharing prospects for the times that best suit your own specific social media accounts. A few minutes each day or every few days when away topping up your Buffer can work wonders when you’re away. It saves you time, effort and ensure you maintain a good relationship with followers when away from the desk.
Apps such as Hootsuite and Tweetdeck also provide you with plenty of benefits too. These are ideal for more generic tweets and shares and allow you to schedule times that suit you. These shares can be prepared for as far in advance as you like, though they will obviously smell of automation to some degree.
However, we find at mysocialagency that apps like Hootsuite allow you the opportunity to monitor other people’s content, check up on analytics and monitor conversations – also beneficial when away.
Discipline
On a lot of levels, the most important thing is discipline. How many of us begin our social media task, whether at work or at home, and then end up being distracted and performing numerous other tasks? Setting a time limit for how long or how much management you’re going to do each day and sticking to it limits the time and stress involved and ensures you don’t feel bad for not spending more time on task.
It’s nice to get away from it all and these apps will help you almost do so completely by increasing efficiency and lowering time spent in front of the screen. What are your tips for keeping your social media ticking over when away?
Martin Sheen is a lover of technology. He also loves getting away from the screen and traveling the world.
