Struggling to Keep Up With Social Media? Here’s What to Do
Life is feeling extra busy right around now, huh? With a wedding boom for the ages and still a somewhat precarious road ahead, a lot of the usual in-house work has a way of ending up on the backburner.
Sure, we’re managing our emails for the most part and we have a few automated systems keeping the ship on course, but most wedding pros are finding that they need to sacrifice their marketing strategy for the sake of their client work.
If you can relate, rest assured that you are not alone. We’re all in a strange stage of figuring everything out as we go along and things like regular social media posting just doesn’t seem to fit into our list of priorities. It becomes more of a “would like to do” rather than a “must do” — which is completely understandable!
Yet, we all know that marketing is an essential piece of growing our business. As this busy season slows down, you still need to keep up with your profit margins and find new clients. Consistent marketing helps you to avoid the feast-or-famine cycles in business, providing you with a steady stream of work.
Fortunately, I’m here to tell you that you can still do it all without adding a whole load of work on your plate. Here are three ways to get your social media presence back on track with minimal effort, so you can still focus on your big deadlines.
Create a content strategy.
Don’t you dread the moment you’re staring at your phone thinking, “What the heck do I post today?” Maybe it’s a slow office day with nothing noteworthy to share. Or, on the contrary, perhaps it’s a busy event day and you just don’t have time to dedicate to crafting the perfect post!
Enter: your content strategy.
A content strategy provides you with a framework to generate all of your content, saving you the never-ending question of what to do next. You know what to post about, so you just need to pick a photo, write a caption, and hit post.
Start by evaluating your business from a big-picture lens. What makes you an expert? How do you help solve your clients’ problems? What can you share that will win over your followers? Sum up that insight into a few categories. Perhaps you have budgeting tips, real wedding inspiration, planning ideas, and advice from your couples.
From there, all you have to do is assign categories for the month ahead and post accordingly. You’ll be able to know if you should share a real wedding photo or a tip for saving money, making it much easier to stay organized!
Experiment with schedulers.
OK, but a content strategy doesn’t save you the headache of having to post every day, right? Nope. To deal with that, it’s time to choose a social media scheduler to do the heavy lifting for you. There are so many on the market: Planoly, Later, HootSuite, Buffer, SkedSocial, CoSchedule...the list really goes on.
Consider the features that are most important to you when posting to social media. Do you want your hashtags to be included in the first comment rather than the post itself? Do you need it to automatically cross-post to other channels? Will you need the ability to schedule to Stories or Reels? Most platforms offer free 30-day trials, so don’t be afraid to try one out for a month before making the big decision.
Once you find your scheduler of choice, it’s all about batch scheduling! Set aside a few hours at the end of each month to prepare your content for the month ahead. It will take time to source photos and write captions, but it will be more efficient and less stressful than feeling the pressure of doing it every day.
Pre-scheduling social content doesn’t mean you can’t post in-the-moment content either. It just means you’ll always have a consistent presence, even when you don’t have the chance to login and share something. If you like posting directly from an event, leave gaps in your calendar so you can keep up the trend!
When in doubt, outsource it out.
The reality is that social media will always require some work on your end, even if it’s more efficient than before. However, that doesn’t mean you need to fit it into your busy schedule. If you have a team, consider delegating social media management to an office manager or someone who simply has a knack for it.
Or, if there’s no bandwidth in your company, find an external social media manager to outsource it. The perks of hiring a professional isn’t just that you get to reclaim your schedule, but you can also rest easy knowing that your online presence is in trustworthy hands. They know the trends and manage social media for other businesses, so you might even see an increase in engagement!
If your social media presence (or lack thereof) has been dragging you down, know that you’re not alone — but also that there are solutions to your problem. Try out one, two, or all of them and never worry again about not doing enough!
