Posting to several social media sites each day can be exhausting, especially when it includes replying to comments and mentions and monitoring hash tags. Some might say it’s too much for one person. However, there are several tips and tricks that can make a social media manager’s life easier.

1. Determine the social media that matter

You don’t need to post on every social media. In fact, you shouldn’t. It’s much more beneficial to concentrate all of your social media marketing efforts in a few key channels. Imagine the difference between posting on 5-10 platforms each day as opposed to 20-30. Not only would that give you more time to work on other projects, it would also give you more time to come up with innovative, thought-provoking posts that will be valuable to your fans and followers. Invest Google Insights, HubSpot or another analytics platform that will tell you the amount of traffic, leads, conversions, buzz and engagement you’re generating from each social medium. From that data, you can determine which channels are worth your concentration. Social media that don’t attract as many customers or generate as many leads as others should be kicked to the curb.

2. Prioritize platforms

Once you know which social media are worth your time, you can prioritize them using the same metrics. Score them for their effectiveness in attracting your target audience, generating leads and engaging with followers. When deciding how much time to allocate for each platform, consider their priority.

3. Plan ahead

Planning ahead alleviates the pressure to produce frequent, fresh content. You could set aside the first half hour of your day to stay on top of social media news and trends – simply scrolling through sites over your morning coffee. That way, when it comes time to talk to your followers, you’ll have something fresh and current to say.
And when you have some down time, you can write and queue posts to be published later on when you don’t have as much time. It’s a win-win: you can make use of slow days and make life easier on busy days. Every time you think of a hash tag, trending topic, joke, quote, funny photo or anything else that can be posted on social media, write it down in a notebook or document where you keep all of your ideas. That will save you time on brainstorming later on, because one of the biggest time sucks is sitting in front of your screen watching the cursor blink.

4. Create a content grid

Another step in the “plan ahead” process can be creating a content grid, or mapping out a weekly or monthly calendar of your social media content. Setting aside a day or two each month to put one together will save you the minutes or hours each day that it takes to come up with new ideas. Ideas don’t have to be written in stone, though. Content grids and calendars are simply a loose guide to follow when you’re busy or stuck. As you read recent news and trend reports, you can replace or push back ideas on the calendar to be used at a later date.
They also help you to plan how often you use certain elements, like photos, videos, jokes, memes, etc. You can also plan out weekly or monthly features. For example, you could plan to post a funny photo every Monday to cheer up your customers. You can also enter information about the keywords, terms, and links you plan to use in each post.

You can find more help here: Develop a Content Marketing Strategy in 5 Easy Steps

5. Use a social media dashboard

Online dashboards like Hootsuite and Social Inbox allow social media managers to monitor all of their preferred platforms at once. You can keep track of all of your follows, mentions, replies and comments from all of your accounts on one screen.

Brittany Learning, a social media manager for HubSpot, said in an interview on their blog that she uses Social Inbox to filter and prioritize their followers, making it easier to monitor many social media at once. She also creates and monitors different streams for hash tags, mentions, keywords and smart lists. Leaning said that using Social Inbox improves HubSpot’s customer experience and her time management. On days that she has several meetings, she can use the dashboard to quickly check for important messages that require an immediate response – without having to weed through a ton of posts.

For more tips, read 5 Social Media Tools to Increase Your Following

A little planning and prioritizing can go a long way. And the more time you have to spend on social media, the higher the quality of your posts.