The marketing team can sit there wasting their time – thinking about slogans, links, quotes or pictures to best engage the audience.

Understanding your organization’s social needs

Remember, social media has tons of potential customers. Business Insider has an interesting viewpoint, “Americans spend more time on social media than any other major Internet activity, including email.”

Being in front of the social network isn’t that uncommon and one survey even suggests that an average American adult spends around 3.2 hours daily browsing their social network.

Now, let’s focus on your marketing team.

Did you know that business owners spend 50% more time on social media than non-business owners?

So, what do you need to know as a business owner? How can you increase your productivity and ensure that your marketing professionals do not solely spend time on social media? Here is what a survey by Social Media Examiner says about how much time marketing professionals spend on social media.

Smaller and medium enterprises are the worst hit and may end up spending a significantly higher amount of time on social media. This is often the result of either a small marketing team or the lack of a good and effective marketing strategy. So, how does the size of your company determine the amount of time your marketing team spends on social media? Here is a look.

Investing time on social media isn’t the end – we need to look at ROI. And statistics reveal that more than one third of CEO’s and business owners want to spend less time on social.

Here is a look at the top 5 ways as to how you and your marketing team can increase ROI and spend less time on social media.

1. Find the right content

This is one of the fundamental questions out there. What do you share if you do not find anything share worthy? Coming out with the right content strategy takes time. In fact, an infographic from Vertical Response states just how much time it takes to research content.

We Rdo not increaseOI solely because we have been focusing on the wrong social media strategy – it’s simple, when it comes to social media, the hours don’t count. Rather, your marketing strategy will determine how effective you are in those hours.

2. Using a social media management system

After deciding on your content, you would need to login to each social network individually and post them to your audience. What if we told you there was an easier way out? A social media management system, much like Social Expo, will help you do this.

Your marketing team needs to save time and you might just end up wasting an hour everyday logging in to all those social media channels time and time again. Instead, with the right social media management system, you can post everywhere, from Facebook to YouTube, at just one go.

You can track your online reputation as well as web traffic and understand how your fan pages are doing. It’s a lot easy to manage your brand from one place.

Understand what’s measuring ROI – it’s not how many likes you have got on a post. Social management helps you get detailed statistics and help you measure ROI. Social Expo is easy to install as well and affordable, so you can just monitor your rankings without any hassle.

3. Automate the postings

Your marketing team needs to look to automate your social media posting. In other words, there is no need to wake up at 3 am in the morning, knowing that you need to post to your target audience then. Instead, just schedule your post and you would be done.

You will be on a regular social media schedule and you would not have to worry about losing out on posting at a particular time.

4. Engage in social listening

Social media is one of the most effective ways to know what others have to say about you. You do not just build your brand, when it comes to social media you are also looking to know what others are saying about you. Social listening helps you track down all comments and responses in social media that talk about you and your company – so that you know what’s going right for you and what’ not.

More, you do not only need to listen what others have to say about you, you can use social listening to know what others are saying about your competitors as well. Knowing your competitor strategy, strengths and weaknesses will help you perform better and adapt quickly to changes.

5. Have a customer service team member respond to questions

Instead of just waiting for questions to pour in, you can have your customer support team member answer your social media queries. Social media often acts as the easiest way for customers to connect to your business and a competent and well versed team member is a necessity.

It’s important to stay focused when coming out with your own social media strategy. You don’t need to create pages verywhere. Instead, create pages only if you have time to maintain them. Most businesses have pages in Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter – today, it’s often a necessity to use these three mediums. Your usage of other social media platforms like Pinterest and YouTube depends on your social media strategy – for instance, if you are looking to engage in audience with videos, a YouTube channel seems to be a great prospect.