Social media management can be very time consuming. You need to publish posts; you need to answer customer queries, engage with your community and find prospective clients to get leads. How can you do this without being on your phone or laptop all day? Here are four tips that you can start implementing straight away.

1. Automate:
For an effective social media marketing, you need to show up every single day. Social media marketing is a 24/7 business. This means you need to have a constant stream of content to push out. Use scheduling tools such as Hootsuite, Buffer or SmarterQueue.
Everyone has different priorities so it is a very personal choice when it comes to selecting one of these tools. Luckily they all offer free trials; so you can decide which one to go for. Once you set it up, you can control all your accounts from one dashboard. Getting ahead on scheduling, will give you more time to actively engage with your community.

2.Find great content: There are some amazing content aggregation tools out there.Some of these can also be integrated with the scheduling tools mentioned above. My personal favourites are Flipboard, Feedly,Buzzsumo and  Google Alerts. Then it is a matter of selecting which content to share.Remember; you don't want to promote your business all the time, share valuable content that people will want to read, engage and share. 

3.Engage,engage,engage: Use every single opportunity to engage with your followers. Don't let comments go unnoticed, reply any queries you receive and look out for opportunities to talk with prospective clients.

4.Build relationships and leads will follow: It is also very important to build relationships with other businesses from your industry, local businesses, prospective clients, influential people, journalists, bloggers and so on. Twitter and Instagram are amazing platforms, you can virtually talk with anyone on these channels. If you are authentic and helpful, people will be interested in talking to you, engage with your content and you will see business results as well. 

Do you have any other tips that work for you? Let me know in the comments.