Looking for social media management tips to help you save time and make a bigger impact?

Look no further!

Whether we like it or not, social media is here to stay. It's been ingrained in us. And I don't just mean in Millennials and Gen Z and Generation Alpha. I mean in us Gen X and Boomers as well.

That's right.

I watched as the world's communication highways shifted from phone calls to MySpace to Facebook and beyond. I remember how marketing worked before social media was ever a thing. And I remember when social media was still new and how many mistakes people made trying to adapt the old methods of marketing over to these new mediums.

Social media is vast.

It's huge. And despite everyone complaining about how it's taking over our lives, it's only getting bigger and more ingrained as the months pass.

Human beings are social animals. Even the most introverted humans thrive with at least some level of regular human interaction. Social validation, that feeling that someone understands our feelings and thoughts, is important to us all. And social media gives us a way of receiving that validation on demand.

So, it's no wonder that we, as authors and writers, find ourselves posting onto social media as a part of our marketing strategies.

However, have you seen just how many social networks there are out there?

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Instagram
• LinkedIn
• TikTok
• Pinterest
• YouTube

And those are just the biggest. Then, of course, there's posting to your blog or website, creating graphics for sharing, and keeping up with any emerging channels as they come out.

I mean, is it any wonder why trying to get a handle on social media marketing can drive some authors insane?

Now, here's another bit of bad news that a lot of first time authors don't realize:

Even if you are traditionally published via an agent and publishing house, you will be expected to burden the bulk of your marketing and social media.

Yep – that's right. A lot of first time authors try to avoid self-publishing because they think that the publishing houses will shoulder the bulk of the marketing, but the truth is publishing houses worry more about distribution than they do about marketing. Don't get me wrong, they still care about and will help you with marketing — they just aren't going to carry the bulk of it.

That's on you.

So, it's more important than ever to develop a strategy that allows you to stay productive and maximize your social media presence. You can't afford to be spending all your time learning social media management. Therefore, I've put together my best social media management tips to help you save you both time and money.

5 Social Media Management Tips for Authors and Writers

1. Focus on and Gather Quality Content

If you don't have time to spend hours and hours every day (or even every week) on social media management, then the time you do spend on there should be effective. And that means sharing the best content your audience wants to read and engage with. Not just some of the time, but every time.

Most importantly, you want to make sure the content you are posting is content your audience will want to share, reshare, and reshare again. Announcements and updates are great, but they rarely get shared. Behind-the-scenes content is also great — and audiences love getting those little sneak peeks. But, again, they aren't likely to share those.

So what kind of content gets shared? Trends, news, research, memes, jokes, puns… just look at your newsfeed and you'll see.

This is one of the reasons why I love HelloWoofy so much as a social media management tool. The Discover tab curates trending stories on a variety of topics from over 50 publications world-wide:

This means I can find and schedule trending content to share to any of my social profiles for my audience to read and share.

Not to mention how easy it is to use their graphics creator, which integrates with both PicMonkey and Canva.

And it makes sense, right? Would you want to share a bad article, a bad photo, or a bad meme with your audience? Of course not.

So while you're putting together a strategy for your announcements, your sales, and your behind-the-scenes content, take some time to develop a strategy that focuses on shareable content.

2. Analyze your Data and Use it

All too often, I see people go into their insights or their pages and either cheer because they got engagement or whine because they got no engagement. But they really don't go any deeper than that.

Analytics and insights don't do you any good if all you do is glance at them every once in a while and never put them to good use. You should be reviewing your analytics at least once a week — and you should be checking once a day on your most active channels.

And you want to analyze that data on every post:

• How did your audience react to that post?
• How did that post affect your overall engagement on that channel?
• How is the frequency of your posts affecting your channel? Does posting more result in more or less engagement?
• When is the best time to be posting? When is your audience most likely to see your content?

Whether you're looking at Page Insights on Facebook, Twitter Analytics, or TikTok Analytics, every single post should be showing you something new about your audience. And every single post should be giving you deeper insights as to how your audience will respond to your next post, your next announcement, and your next campaign.

Your best bet for this? Get a social media management tool that gathers data and analytics for you — plenty of tools do it. That way, instead of logging into so many of your social media platforms every day to check the analytics, you can view them from a single dashboard.

3. Comment, engage, and be your charming, beautiful self on other people's content

Now this step is where I see a lot of authors and writers go wrong. They want their readers, followers, and fans to engage with their content, but then they don't ever engage back with them.

Social media is meant to be social…and social interaction is a two-way street. That means when someone comments on one of your posts, you should be reacting to their comment: like or heart the comment and respond to it with another comment (this is, of course, presuming that the comment is not a troll).

Then, you'll want to take this a step further. Go check out what your readers are doing, engage with their content, like some of their pictures and retweet some of their puns. They will love the attention and you will love the interaction when they reciprocate.

The best way to get noticed is to notice others. So go show an interest in your readers and fans, and they will continue to show some interest in you.

4. Use automation wisely and pre-schedule some of your content

Let me start this tip off by saying there is a lot of bad information out there when it comes to social media automation and prescheduling your content.

A lot of bad information.

The truth is, prescheduling your content when you can gives you a host of advantages:

• Ability to create a strategic content plan that flows nicely and builds on itself.
• Keeps you from overposting or getting spammy.
• Helps keep you consistent so you don't forget to post.
• When done well, can actually double and even triple your engagement rates with your audience.
• Saves you time by allowing you to batch the task into productive hours.

Now, whatever you want to use to schedule your content is completely up to you. I always recommend you write down the features you want in a social media management tool first, then start comparing the tools available to see which one has the features you need.

On the surface, every tool appears the same. But the truth is, each one has different features that helps it to stand out. By knowing the features you need before looking at them, you'll have a better chance of finding one that will help you carry out your strategy rather than trying to find workarounds and loopholes in a tool that isn't going to work for you because it doesn't have the features you need.

I use HelloWoofy for my scheduling needs. It's AI-driven, which means it keeps an eye on the trends so I don't have to. And it comes with a content aggregator as well as a content library, graphics editors (yes, plural), a hashtag bank, and analytics.

In fact, right now, HelloWoofy is offering a lifetime pro account for a one-time payment of $49. I cannot exaggerate how good of a deal this is. If you want a good tool to help you schedule and manage your social media content, jump on this deal now before it ends.

A lot of authors worry that by using automation they won't appear genuine to their audience. But honestly, you'll appear less genuine if you disappear for a week or throw up fluff because you're too busy to put together a solid strategy and post it. The trick here is that you want to automate some of your posts so that your presence remains consistent and effective, but keep your engagement spontaneous.

Additionally, social media management and automation is not exactly something that you can just set and forget. Things can happen that may send you running back to your automation tool to make changes, move things around, or cancel a post altogether. With a tool like HelloWoofy, you can go in and make changes to your schedule right up until the minute something is getting ready to post, giving you plenty of flexibility and power over your content.

5. Streamline and batch your repetitive tasks

There are some things that you will just have to do on the fly: replying to comments, retweeting someone's content, responding to a hot new trend that just broke. But for almost everything else, you can (and should) streamline your work into batches and automate as many pieces as you can to make everything easier and more efficient.

For example, you can use Zapier to help save a backup copy of your posts on Facebook to a Google Sheet so you can find it for easy reference and repurposing later. You can use a service like IFTTT to alert you and save posts when someone tags you on certain social media channels. With a little work, you can even set up IFTTT to email you with a new blog post idea whenever you save a pin onto a certain board over on Pinterest… just so you don't forget later to write it up.

One thing you don't want to do is to set up an automated process in which you'll post to one channel (say, Facebook) and then automatically one of these tools will send the same post over to Twitter and LinkedIn for you. People don't want to see the exact same post on all your channels – especially all at the exact same time. So even though that may feel like it's streamlining and more productive, in reality it's just coming off as lazy and inefficient.

Instead, use tools like Zapier, Integromat, and IFTTT to connect your social accounts to other platforms that will make your administrative work easier, such as tweeting a new post right after publishing a new blog post or podcast episode or saving some of your favorite motivational quotes over onto a Google Sheet so you can build them into shareable graphics later.

Did you enjoy this article? Here are some more posts on social media marketing for authors and writers you may like:

• Book Marketing for Authors 101: I'm Ignoring All Your Sales Announcements (And Here's Why)
• Create a Facebook VIP Group that Rocks (and keep it that way)
• Using the new Clubhouse App for Writers
• Please Get Rid of that Twitter Feed on the Sidebar!
• What to do when you get Overwhelmed by the Social Media Marketing World

Social Media Management Tips and FAQ