Does social media feel like a heavy soul-crushing obligation? You’re not the only one with those sentiments.
Here’s a testimonial snippet from an attendee of a recent speaking engagement:
“Most of the time we’d walk out of the talk feeling a heavy obligation hanging over our heads like the sweet meteor of death, eager to crush our souls. Melody made [social media] sound like fun and doable, instead of an arcane process involving ritual sacrifices.”
That’s right: social media can be fun and is doable! No meteor of death necessary.
Tools Aren’t Just for Carpenters – or People Who Work on Space Stuff
For the sake of this blog post, I’m assuming you already have a social media account somewhere, be it Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn or one of several others.
Now your job is to learn a few tools so you can manage your social media. There’s a learning curve, of course, but once you get them figured out, your social media life will be easier. All of these have free versions that work just fine for the beginner, and when you’re ready to advance, there are paid versions to help support you.
This tried and true social media management tool has been around a long time and remains a great way to manage multiple accounts. Over 10 million people use it. You can manage Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Google+, Foursquare and WordPress blogs using one dashboard.
You don’t have to give a hoot about some kind of death by meteor.
This is another tool to manage postings to multiple social media accounts. You can manage Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ pages and Pinterest (only with paid versions). As they say on their About page: “You add updates to your Buffer queue and it will be posted for you well spaced out over the day – and at the best times.”
That’s right. They’ll do the heavy thinking. They’re buffering you from that meteor. Yeah, I went there.
With today’s visual-intensive online environment, you must include graphics in your social media marketing or miss out on engagement opportunities. Along comes Canva. It’s easy to learn for those who are not graphic artists and has a variety of free templates and graphics to use in your designs. You can look like you know what you’re doing.
And if you wanted to create a graphic using the “sweet meteor of death” – you could. There’s no judgment on Canva.
To help make your Canva experience go smoothly, it’s best to have a source of free-to-use graphics beyond what they offer. LibreStock has a great tagline: “Search the best 47 free stock photo websites in one place.” They’ll do the searching for you.
Just from a statistics standpoint, it seems reasonable that at least one of those 47 sites has a meteor photo or graphic. And ponies. And serious business people doing serious business things. You can find anything there.
Feedly is a content curation tool where you can add websites that relate to your industry in one place. Just log in and you can easily see the latest postings in the dashboard without having to move all over the internet looking for your fave sites. It even integrates with Buffer to make it extra-easy to share relevant content with your audience.
We like extra-easy – because death meteors aren’t. They’re difficult.
Give yourself the gift of tools and the gift of time to learn these tools, and I promise you’ll avoid the sweet meteor of death caused by the overwhelm of social media. You can be meteor-free and socially successful.
What tools do you use to make social media easier?
Melody Jones is Founder and CEO of Social Media Management Services. Melody is your Social Media Aspirin, here to take the pain away so you can go about your business. Visit her list of services to learn about her programs, upcoming workshops, and coaching services.
