What if I told you that you could save hours of time on your social media marketing each week? 

You probably know by now just how important it is to be active in your social media marketing in order to build your brand, network, promote your products and services and generally send traffic to your website.

But what nobody seems to talk about is just how time-consuming it all is!

I could easily spend all day, every day on social media (and that doesn’t include the time I spend watching TikTok!)

When I first started my online business, I could spend up to 10-12 hours a week just scheduling social media posts.

Every Sunday I would put on a YouTube playlist (or 2 or 3!), sit down and schedule my social media posts for the week ahead.

With around 20 Tweets, 2 Instagram posts, 2 Facebook Group posts and 4 Story updates each day, I would easily spend 3-5 hours altogether manually putting it all together.

Add networking, replying to comments, and taking part in sharing/promo threads into the mix and most of my time was being spent on social media marketing. 

Whilst what I was doing was time-consuming, it was working.

My traffic from social media was growing daily, my email list was growing each week and I was making more and more sales/getting more and more new inquiries.

But maintaining that level of work each week was impossible, so I set out to find ways to save time!

So, today I’m going to share my top social media marketing time-saving tips with you.

1. Plan your content ahead of time

One of the main things that helps me save time scheduling social media is knowing exactly what I’m going to be posting.

There’s nothing like a last-minute blind panic to slow you down!

Trust me, when you rush, you make mistakes and everything takes twice as long!

Planning ahead also means that you can batch tasks which saves more time. 

Knowing what you’re going to publish and when might not seem like it’s going to save you any time when it comes to social media, but anything that helps you get organised and plan ahead is going to seriously cut down on the time content creation takes.

The same goes for promotions, so plan out any launches, flash sales, affiliate promos, etc. out for the week or even the month ahead of time.

2. Use templates for content creation

If you’re looking for a way to significantly save time when it comes to creating and scheduling social media content, templates are it!

Every social media platform requires different dimensions for graphics and you’ll usually want to create multiple variations for each platform.

This means for each blog post, freebie, service, course…whatever you’re promoting, you could be creating around 10 different images/graphics. 

That’s a lot of images and it could take you hourssssss to create them all.

But, because I use templates, it takes me about 20 minutes to create them all.

I’ll be completely honest, it took me a few hours to create all of the templates initially, but now that I have them, they save me loads of time in the long run.

Now each time I need to create new graphics for a blog post, I just have to log into my Canva account, make a copy of the templates and update them!

Simple!

You can find lots of great templates for free online – just search for some in your niche.

Or spend some time putting some together that are completely on-brand for your business.

(If you’re not sure where to start with this – I can help! Just shoot me an email for some free advice)

3. Use a scheduling tool

Scheduling your social media posts ahead of time can allow you to batch the content creation. 

Batching can save you a lot of time in the long run, and make your social media marketing more efficient.

There are lots of schedulers out there to choose from – from free to very expensive – all with a huge variety of features.

So if you’re new to scheduling, I’d definitely recommend using a free tool first to get an idea of how it works and whether it’s worth investing in for your business.

To start out you can use Creator Studio – the free scheduling tool offered by Meta to post to Instagram and Facebook. You can find it in your Business Suite. 

From there you can schedule in everything from posts, to reels, to stories. And include things like alt-text and location tags.

But if you’re looking for something more advanced (or want to schedule more than Instagram and Facebook), some third-party tools offer free plans you can try.

I have used many schedulers in the past and some of my favourites have been Later, Hootsuite, and Sprout Social. 

Out of those 3, Later offers a free plan which is perfect for a business or entrepreneur with only one profile on different social media platforms. 

It allows you to import your media, add notes and visualise your posts ahead of time, to see how your new feed will look. 

Again, this is one of those things that can take a bit of time to get set up, especially if you have lots of content and profiles that you need to schedule in content for, but it’s a one-and-done thing and saves a SERIOUS amount of time each week.

Want to save even more time on your social media marketing? Hire help!

These tips will help you save hours each week but if you’re looking to save even more time, outsourcing your social media content creation and scheduling might just be the answer you’re looking for.

And I can help! I offer done-for-you content creation for a very affordable price.

I can also help you with your strategy and work out where to prioritise. Just get in touch today for a free chat.