1 Minute Marketing — Tools to Simplify Social Media Marketing Content Distribution

Social media marketing is becoming a major part of both small and big business marketing, whether your market is local to Eureka CA or reaches an international audience. But where to begin? Facebook e marketing strategies become ever more important, but you also need to consider opportunities on Twitter, Foursquare, Pinterest, Google+, LinkedIn and other social media networks.

Each of these social networks is an opportunity to connect with fans and prospects of your business, and most networks have similar restrictions to what you can post, meaning the same post can be used across all of them. That reduces the amount of time you’ll need to write the actual content, but that still doesn’t address your need to actually post each individual item.

There are two ways to go about completing social media posts:
1. Post the content you have in real time
2. Schedule several posts in advance

While the first option is the most common way, it is also the most time consuming. Scheduling your posts in advance as the second option suggests does mean you have to write several posts at once, but then you can simply schedule them for days or weeks in advance, putting your social media marketing on autopilot and saving you (or your staff) time. Whether your business is based in Eureka CA or anywhere else, this capability is available to you.

Some social networks allow you to schedule posts already. If you are primarily using Facebook e marketing strategies, you can now schedule your posts straight from your business page’s wall — there’s a small clock icon just below where you type in your post. For those focused on Linked In Marketing, scheduling isn’t available from the site directly but you can post to both LinkedIn and Twitter at once.

To really simplify your social media marketing, use a tool like Hootsuite that allows you to schedule posts across multiple networks in advance. It currently supports Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Foursquare, WordPress, MySpace and Mixi (a Japanese social network). While this doesn’t include all the heavy hitters in social media, it does include most. You can schedule posts individually from the main dashboard or you can bulk schedule up to 350 posts at once by uploading a correctly formatted file with your content.

Other similar tools are also available — find the one that works best for your company. Just don’t forget to respond to people’s comments and messages while your posts are on autopilot!