Do you ever find yourself just wishing you had more hours in the day to get stuff done? Is it a rarity that you actually manage to tick every task off on your to-do list at the end of a long day? Hey, don't worry — we get it!

The social media marketers (SMM) of today are essentially superheroes armed with a smartphone. They’re expected to be highly skilled in a range of areas, from graphic design and creative copywriting to data and analytics. They’re also key players in managing a brand’s reputation, offering customer service, dealing with crisis management, and finding new leads, all while keeping up with the tsunami of new trends and social media platform updates that continuously appear before our eyes.All the above has us wanting to block and delete anyone who thinks a career in social media is all rainbows, butterflies, and TikTok dances. Of course, it’s an incredibly fun and rewarding career, but like many other jobs, it can have its challenges. Fortunately, there are plenty of useful tools and strategies out there to help you to become more efficient and make your job a whole lot easier. So, if you’re a busy social media marketer feeling like you have hundreds of tabs open in your head, this one’s for you. Keep reading for our tips and tricks on increasing productivity. 

#1 — Batch content tasks to be more time-efficient

Do you ever feel like you are on a constant content creation treadmill, rarely able to get on top of content creation? Then you can definitely benefit from the first productivity hack of this blog: content batching. This is a nifty little productivity technique and workflow system in which you put an allocated amount of time towards batching certain content. Content batching allows you to put time, energy, and complete focus into a single task as opposed to switching tasks and multitasking throughout the day or coming up with content ideas as you go. The latter can lead to serious burnout and poor results.Some ideas on how you can batch your content to increase your productivity as a busy social media marketer include:

• Batching all your social captions for the next week

• Dedicate a couple of hours in the morning to planning blog topics for the next month

• Setting aside a day to design any content required for the next week

• Spending a couple of hours on scheduling the next month’s content

By giving yourself a dedicated amount of time to achieve your goals without any fuss or distractions, you will be sure to create ultra-focused, high-quality content while eliminating overwhelm and creative burnout.

#2 — Use a content editor for streamlined content creation

Creative, eye-catching, visual content is a must for brands wanting to engage their target audience amidst the growing sea of competition and ever-changing algorithms. While some teams may be lucky enough to have a dedicated graphic designer to create every single piece of social content, for others, this is another responsibility that falls onto the social media marketer. And we all know too well that this is a time-consuming task. Fortunately, today there are some brilliant creation platforms that enable social teams to streamline the way they produce high-quality social media content. Instead of having to navigate the *scary* world of Photoshop and going back and forth with designers to ensure brand consistency, creators can leverage these all-in-one platforms to create branded content in a matter of seconds. Social and marketing teams can save heaps of time by seamlessly creating, editing, and optimizing video, image, and graphic content on one easy-to-use platform.We can’t mention powerful content creation platforms without giving ourselves a cheeky plug now, can we? Slate is seriously every social media marketer’s dream, helping them to save time when creating high-quality, highly-engageable content across social platforms. But don’t just take our word for it — go check it out yourselves with a free demo.

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#3 — Repurpose content for optimum engagement

The term “reduce, reuse, and recycle” isn’t just applicable to our environmental efforts. Our next productivity hack for social media marketers is all about reducing time spent on creating content by reusing and recycling older content.Many of us are far too guilty of spending hours of hard work creating a piece of content only for it to be posted once in one content form. And with algorithms making it harder than ever to get our content in front of the eyes of our audience, posting once just isn’t enough in order to get the results we desire.  Not only does repurposing your content allow you to claim some valuable hours back into your life, but it also enables you to lengthen the exposure of your efforts as well as increase engagement levels.  Here are a few ideas on how you can start to repurpose your content:

• Transcribe a podcast or video interview and work it into a blog post

• Pull quotes from an interview and create social media graphics

• Turn an informative carousel Instagram post into a short and snappy TikTok video

• Turn a blog into a Twitter thread

• Repurpose a whitepaper into a blog post or YouTube video

• Turn a live webinar into a gated piece of video content for lead capture

• Create a Pinterest board for your Instagram graphics

#4 — Leverage project management tools for better organization

From strategizing content to putting together a quarterly performance report — there are so many tasks social media marketers have to juggle daily and this can be seriously overwhelming. But fear not, helping to create some calm amongst the chaos are a multitude of project management and workflow tools available today. These platforms are designed to help busy social media marketers stay organized, keep on top of task tracking, and improve collaboration between the whole marketing team — all of which enable increased productivity. Some of the most popular project management tools loved by social media marketers across the globe include:

• Asana: A user-friendly project management tool to plan and organize. It enables SMMs to create different projects and add tasks, giving managers and team members a complete overview for improved collaboration.

• Monday.com: Create different color-coded project boards, assign team members to various tasks, share files, time track projects — this tool promises to make managing your daily tasks a whole lot easier.

• Trello: This visual collaboration platform makes organizing social media campaigns so easy and satisfying. Users can create customizable boards and cards. From storing social media resources for your team to easily access to creating a visual to-do list that you can move from ‘doing’ to ‘done’ - the possibilities are endless!

#5 — Remember to unplug and refresh

So our last “hack” might not come in the form of a cool digital tool or app. But it is quite possibly the most important tip of this blog post. Of course, the nature of a social media marketer’s job involves spending the majority of their days on social media. The plethora of information and content on social platforms is a lot for our brains to process, and consuming this content continuously can take a huge mental toll. This “always online” feeling is having a negative impact across the industry, with many professionals looking to change their careers as a result of burnout. But how can social media professionals unplug when being plugged in is your career?Well actually, there are many ways you can and should be unplugging. Giving yourself a digital breather is essential to a healthy and productive way of working. Take a look at a couple of tips you can try:

• Separate work accounts from your personal phone if you can, or switch off notifications before and after working hours.

• Set boundaries and learn to say no. The world of social media never stops, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t. Have honest conversations with management if you feel you’re continuously having to work outside of your working hours.

• Take off-screen breaks during the day —  whether that’s going for a walk, meditating, or eating a yummy lunch away from your desk.

• Have a digital detox. For example, try having a complete break from social media every Sunday. That way you can go into the new week feeling refreshed and ready to go again!

Need help ensuring your brand personality is reflected visually and consistently throughout your content? Let us show you around with a demo of Slate’s content creation platform today.