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by Natwar Maheshwari – Founder of Around.io
How You Can Save 15+ Hours Per Week on Social Media Marketing
If you’re using social media to promote your shop / products, you know it is time-consuming.
One thing leads to another and you’ve ended up spending hours on Facebook. Or Pinterest – which is even worse (or should we say better) at sucking your time. All to post just a couple of products from your shop.
That’s exactly what happens to Britney*.
Britney is an avid crafter who sells on Etsy. Britney is like you – she loves creating.
It’s the marketing part of her shop that gets to her because marketing is hard, time-consuming and the results are often not great. When you add social media to the marketing mix, it’s even harder. Every single day, Britney pins photos, writes messages on Facebook, makes sure the links are correct… and to top it off, she has to do the same thing over and over again.
But social media is one of her popular marketing channels where she promotes her shop, engages with her customers and fans and runs contests. So she puts up with 1-2 hours of social media marketing work every day that helps her find more sales.
What if you’re able to save those 1-2 hours every day? What more could you get done?
As an entrepreneur myself, I think that you should always think of ways to reduce time and effort. Because that’s the only way to save time that you can spend on crafting, shipping or any other productive activity.
It took Britney a long time to figure out one thing that most successful entrepreneurs – especially, Etsy sellers who make upwards of $50,000/year – know. It’s a thing every pro swears by: automation.
Automation is where you let someone / some tool take care of some part of your business saving you lots of time and manual effort.
In Britney’s world, she knew she was spending too much time promoting her products on social media. She was active on Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest. She needed something that would automate social media marketing but wouldn’t sound robotic.
Britney started using Around.io and has since saved 15+ hours of work every week because the tool takes care of scheduling and posting to social media.
It’s not the tool that matters though. What matters is learning to get into the mindset of automating your daily processes.
In the midst of growing our shops, we do things manually (that’s how we all start) to find out what brings traffic and gets those cherished sales. Once you’ve settled into your routine of activities, the next step is to figure out if you can automate it.
Automation is not hard given the resources we have these days.
For instance, there are a handful of automation tools for social media alone. Finding the right one is what takes a bit of time.
I’ve used a bunch of these tools myself and built Around.io because no other tool integrates with ecommerce shops the way it should or automates social media marketing correctly.
One of the first things that I set out to do was to create a simple process by which online sellers can schedule a day or week’s worth of social media posts (of their products) in a couple of clicks. After all these months, the Day and Week planner are one of the most-used features in Around.io.
The Day and Week planners pick a bunch of products from your shop (with description, photos, links etc.) and create a schedule of posts or pins or tweets – you can then edit them and create the plan. In about 1-2 minutes, you will have scheduled an entire week’s worth of social posts.
That explains why it’s one of Britney’s favorite features.
But that’s not the only feature.
As an online seller, sometimes you want to promote just one product across multiple social channels. One way to make this simple is to import all products from your shop to the tool you use for social marketing so you can pick any product to share. This is probably the most important feature for any seller (right after the Day / Week planner).
And that’s a feature built into Around.io so sellers can cherry-pick any product and instantly share or schedule it to be posted on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest etc.
Over time, sellers like Britney become even more active on social media where she shares not just products but interesting crafty articles (like the ones on Jen’s blog) and runs promotions and more. The way pro sellers grow their social profile is by sharing engaging content – from Google, from blogs, from other shops etc.
Around.io helps in this too because it has built-in content curation. So you can enter any keyword and find interesting content to share. Or you can add your favorite blogs (as feeds) and share the latest posts from your favorite blogs in a jiffy. Or you can also share funny GIFs or photos.
The bottom-line is how much time you’re able to save on social media without compromising on the traffic (and sales) you get from it. With the right plan and tool, you can save about 15+ hours every week which is a lot of time to craft, deliver happiness to customers, engage with fans and do lots more.
If there’s one thing that I want you to take away from this post, it’s this:
Get into the habit of finding out things you can automate, and finding out how you can save time by optimizing your workflow.
And if you’re doing social media marketing, check out Around.io to find out how it makes you much more productive by saving you a lot of time.
*Britney is the protagonist of our fictional online seller story drawn from real life.
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