“I don’t have the time to set up social media profiles”
The main spend in social media is time, which is in short supply for most of us. Looking at initial shortcuts and approaches that will help you streamline set-up:
Preparation and organisation help keep social media implementation quick and efficient. Given the immediacy of the web and the multitude of other work for businesses of any size to accomplish, you ideally want a well-organised system that fits into daily work routines.
And which can be assigned across various staff members, to share the fun, learnings; and the workload…as you and your team get used to integrating this work into other responsibilities and starts to understand what channels and input will work for you, often with just short sharp bursts of time and energy once or twice daily; or even every second day for 10-30 minutes.
Profile set-up and maintenance is easier if you have everything you need rapidly accessible. You will also be consistent with representing your brand/business and uploading images, information and graphics that complement your various social media profiles.
Keep both a computer and offline folder (for back-up) with:
- Log-in names and passwords (both online and offline)
- Basic corporate information regularly required for online forms, including corporate IDs and abbreviations, tax and GST numbers (if relevant for buying into subscription services, small software/app purchases etc), street address, telephone etc
- All email addresses being used for this project. You can easily use your current emails, but over time, may decide you need 2-3 stand-alone minimum – to keep any social media mail received separate from regular business email
- Images in several sizes and vertical/horizontal formats. From a small square thumbnail of logos for profile pics, to photos and graphics for photo galleries, background Twitter designs, etc. You need variety so visitors don’t see the same single image each time, except of course for your branding and logo.
Visitors online have short attention spans and expect variety and fresh content on repeat visits. Don’t have many images? Get royalty-free suitable pics and graphics from Google Images or an affordable online photo-library.
- A file of any videos suitable for social media, eg. made for YouTube, corporate or promotional videos; and fresh/decent quality user-generated videos by colleagues, contacts, fans and friends.
- Titles, sub-titles and taglines written. Also both short summary descriptions (150 – 200 characters or words) and longer descriptions (1000 – 2000 characters) for use.
- Keywords/Tags list – what are the main keywords that drive visitors to your site? You’ll frequently have to drop these into tags and keyword lists, so have them close at hand.
- Copy of current ‘About Us’ or summary information about your business and what you’re offering new customers and clients – your key selling points and benefits.
Yes it sounds basic, but inventing the wheel every time you have a new field to fill out is hardly good use of your valuable time. Be prepared, as the boy scouts always advise.
