Invest in Tools That Make Your Life Easier
Working smart, not hard is the best way to get the biggest return on your time investment. Life hacks and delegation are essential for making life and business easier. Whether it’s having a team to maximize your output or apps and management tools that do the work automatically, having support is essential.
One of the pioneers for using tools in business is Tim Ferris. Ferris’ book, The Four-Hour Work Week, broke the charts and stayed a best-seller for over four years. Written in 2007, Ferris shared cutting edge ideas about time management and delegation that were esoteric at the time. Nowadays, his tips and tricks are relatively mainstream and easy to apply.
Here’s a list of three tool categories that will make your life easier:
Graphics Tools
A huge part of social media engagement comes from graphics. Designing graphics can be tedious and time consuming. Having a tool that generates graphics easily is a must. Not everyone understands Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop, which can be very confusing and discouraging. For easier graphic design, there are affordable websites that have no-fee and low-fee plans. Check out PicMonkey, Canva, or RelayThat for easy-to-use graphic design tools.
Social Media Management Tools
There are multiple websites designed to help integrate and manage social media platforms. These tools allow you to preplan your output and posts and allow you to post to multiple social media platforms at one time. Love Twitter? Consider TweetDeck – a dashboard that lets you plan tweets, monitor engagement, and simplify your Twitter experience. Hootsuite is a great tool to manage posts to Facebook. The platform allows you to pre-schedule your posts and alerts you when you have engagement.
Personal Assistant Tools
Sometimes the best tool has a beating heart. Hiring a personal assistant or virtual assistant (VA) is an excellent way to be two places at one time. Or three or four. Being able to delegate and have work done on your behalf is easier and more affordable than ever. You don’t have to know everything about your business to be successful. Successful people aren’t the smartest in the room, they surround themselves with great people who know a lot about something very specific. The teamwork makes the dream work.
Having tools is the way to go for managing your time wisely, but don’t overdo it. It’s important to keep a personal touch with your engagement. If you use tools to post automatically, make sure you go back and engage with your community when they begin to respond to your content. Also, make sure any virtual assistants are engaging with the community in the tone and manner consistent with your brand. It’s great to have tools, but they must be managed with a personal touch.
Ready to streamline your tasks and maximize productivity with the right tools? Harness the power of Social Maestro for your social media management needs! Contact us to explore how Social Maestro can elevate your online presence, engage your audience, and streamline your social media strategy for awesome results.
I love Canva! Can’t imagine where I would be without it. But I forgot about Hootsuite. I’m going to go check it out again.
Super helpful tips, thanks, Paul! I use Adobe Audition for my podcast so I use Adobe Express for my graphics (since I pay for Creative Suite) and I really like it. It has a different vibe than Canva and since I’m paying for it I have access to the premium graphics. I just discovered that my website allows me to post my blogs to social media in one go, breaking it out so I can have difference content in the post if I want to, but one click sends them all out. I had been doing it manually for SO long, this is such a relief!
I use Canva and make a lot of my own graphics. It’s a lot of fun. It took me some time to learn it, but I am getting better at it.