Ask the expert: Alecia Hancock of Hancock Creative shares her tips for mastering your social marketing. If one of your goals is to streamline your workload to be more efficient and effective, then read on!

BATCHING
There is real research that  shows it takes our brains at least 15 minutes to tune into a task from the time we start it. So if you’re super proud of your multitasking prowess, it’s time to think again. Multitasking is not productive. Intense focus is.
Don’t try to do all the elements of your social media management at once. Batch tasks like planning, writing funny posts, scheduling, taking pictures, and so on.
If you try to switch from creating vision heart-centred posts to funny ones to grabbing a quick Boomerang, you’re actually going to take longer to get everything done. Instead pick a theme, a content pillar or a group of tasks and do them all in one go. You’ll be amazed at how much more you get done.
SCHEDULING
If you don’t already schedule content in advance, now is the time to change that. While some content definitely has to be live and in the moment, a lot of it can be created ahead of time.
While a 12-month plan is the holy grail, start small. Try creating all your content for a week. Or all content on one theme for the whole month. Once you start getting in the habit of scheduling you will be astounded by far ahead you can get your posts scheduled.
RE-PURPOSE
Let’s make our social media environmentally friendly this year. Let’s reuse and recycle our best content, not just throw it in the trash. While I’m not an advocate of just posting the same thing over and over, I am a fan of finding ways good content can be repurposed and reused.
Let’s take a Facebook Live for example. Here’s a few things you can do:

• Turn it into an ad
• Download it and cut it into pieces for posting on other platforms at other times
• Get it transcribed and turn it into a blog post
• Take a few key facts or interesting quotes and make them into graphics
• Reschedule it to share again in another 3 months when it’s timely again

CURATE
You don’t have to create everything yourself. It is okay to mix up your created content with curated. By curated content, I mean materials other people have already created.
You can find great content posts on other social media channels, share links and articles, or even just take inspiration from what someone else is posting about and add your own spin to it.
My top tip is creating a library of great content sources on your phone or laptop – then you can quickly skim through these resources whenever you’re content planning and pick out the stuff you love.
READ YOUR NUMBERS
The biggest single time waster on social media is creating content without checking out your analytics. You MUST be looking at your data each time you create content otherwise you’re going to continue spending time creating content that isn’t serving you.
I’d shudder to think how many hundreds of hours are being wasted a year creating content that does nothing for your audience or your organisation. Figure out what is working and spend more time on that.
GIVE YOURSELF A TIME LIMIT
Have you ever noticed the really weird phenomenon that no matter how much time you give yourself to complete a project, it always seems to take exactly that amount of time?
You’re not crazy. It’s a thing. Apparently our brains will adjust to the amount of time we allocate for a project. Creating your content planner for the month could take you all day, or it could just take you a few hours, if that is all the time you’ve allocated.
Push yourself to get it done in a shorter period of time to figure out what you’re really capable of.
DONE IS BETTER THAN PERFECT
If yesterday’s newspaper is today’s fish and chip wrapping, what is yesterday’s social media? Who cares!
If you’re struggling to ‘make time’ for social media chances are you’re way overthinking it. You need to practice just getting things done. Create bulk posts quickly. Do that Facebook Live with just a sketched out plan.
It’s always better to put out okay content on a schedule than to create it sporadically because you’re waiting until it’s just right.