For most small businesses with a social media strategy, it’s the business owner that has to manage social media accounts on top of all of his/her other responsibilities since there often isn’t room in the budget for a full time social media specialist. When social media is the responsibility of the owner or another employee who must balance it with other job functions, care must be taken to not let social media absorb too much time, especially if it’s not producing measurable results. The following tips will help you achieve more with your social media strategy while doing less.

Create a social media schedule

It’s very easy to open up Facebook with the intention of responding to a few comments on a post you’ve created to find yourself several hours later doing something completely different. To prevent this, try creating a social media schedule where you set aside a set amount of time in regular increments (it could be daily, or perhaps every other day) to work on social media accounts. In addition to scheduling specific times for social media, you can specify which things you will take care of during each of those blocks of time. By taking the time once at the beginning of each month to plan out your social media efforts for that month, you’ll ultimately save time.

Choose your channels carefully

The problem may be that you’re trying to manage too many social media accounts in the first place. There are many social media platforms and no rule that you have to be active on every single one of them. Even major brands will sometimes ignore platforms that are less profitable for them. Different platforms have different strengths and weaknesses and different user bases. When the time you have to dedicate to social media marketing, is limited, you have to be more selective about where you’re spending your time. Look at the platforms you’re currently using. Which ones tend to attract the time of customer you’re looking for. Which ones are seeing the best customer engagement? When you link to your company website from social media, which platforms are driving the most traffic?” These are the platforms you want to prioritize and you can cut back–or cut out entirely–all other platforms to allow you to focus on those that matter more to your brand’s success.

Focus on quality over quantity

The ideal for social media is to frequently post high quality content, but if there’s only time for quantity or quality, always go for quality. It’s far better to have one excellent, well thought-out and carefully worded post per day than several hastily thrown together posts every day. Another thing that’s more important than quantity is consistency. Make sure that you’re not posting a lot one day, and then nothing for several days. One good post per day may be all your brand needs to succeed on social media.

Automate where possible

There are a number of tools that allow you to schedule social media posts in advance so you don’t have to log into all of your accounts every day in order to post every day. As part of your monthly or weekly social media planning, you can use these tools to plan out and schedule posts for the remainder of the week or month so you can literally set it and forget it to focus on other things.

Another way to automate social media efforts is through designing a chatbot to operate on a social media’s chat platform such as Facebook Messenger. If you have a chatbot that can answer customers’ questions for you, then you can get by without signing into social media every day without upsetting customers who might otherwise feel ignored.