Once reserved for communicating with friends and family, social media has now blossomed into a growing empire that affects consumers, businesses and virtually everybody else. These shifts have resulted in many brands and businesses giving social media a second look, as the power it can provide to brands with respect to marketing and outreach is incredible. Successful social media strategies revolve around a few common points, with one of them being time management. You need to allocate consistent time and effort to your social media strategy, but this can be hard when you’re strapped for time. We’ll talk today about what you can do to improve social media strategy even when you have no free time.

Schedule Everything

Social media – when used properly – should be posting on your behalf multiple times per day. It can be hard to check back in every few hours to see how things are going and to make a new post, so why not take advantage of scheduling? You can start pinging servers on Facebook and other social networks with pre-scheduled posts that will go out at a specific time and date. Facebook, for instance, lets you schedule page posts up to six months in advance. This is a great way to take some of the stress off of constantly engaging with social media and can help your brand to always be pumping out new stories, articles, news and content.

Limit Your Involvement

Contrary to what some say, you don’t need to be on every social media network in order to be successful. Especially if it’s just you running everything, who has time for all of that? Instead, use  research, data or your best judgement to determine which networks contain the most likely followers for your brand and commit to those. By sticking to just 1 or 2 social media networks, you’ll have more time to focus on each of them – which is good, considering that quality trumps quantity in the world of social media.

Allocate Specific Blocks of Time

If you don’t have much free time to spend on social media, then accept it and make a plan. How much time can you give to social media each day, and what do you intend to do with that time? By planning in advance where you will interact, how you will post and what else needs to be scheduled, configured or uploaded, you can make more efficient use of each day’s postings. Whether you need to setup some new ads or respond to comments, knowing in advance how much time will be allocated can help you avoid getting burnt out and losing ground to the competition.

You don’t have to be pinging servers 24/7 to be successful on social media. It does require a bit of time each day, but you can easily manage this time in a number of ways. By scheduling posts and content in advance, allocating specific blocks of time each day for social media maintenance and limiting your involvement to just a couple of networks, you won’t feel overwhelmed and will have plenty of energy to do what’s needed.