Social media already had the reputation of being a major time suck. Then it forced its way onto the overflowing daily To Do list of the average small business owner.

Now you’re left with a list of regular social media duties, a limited amount of time to complete them all, and a lot of confusion over how best to approach all those social media tasks in the most efficient and effective way.

So how do you go about organizing your time each day among all the social media platforms you’ve created for your small business?

Here are 5 steps you need to work through.

5 Steps to Organizing your Daily Social Media Time

1. Assess before Adding Another One common decision we see many social media newbies make is to create and get started on 4+ social media accounts all at once. While each platform has its own benefits and can be used to engage with a different type of audience, being too many places at once often means you aren’t maximizing your effectiveness on any platform. Plus, not every social media platform makes sense for every type of business. Unless you have endless amounts of time each day and extensive knowledge of several platforms, it’s likely a better decision to instead learn about and  focus your efforts to do a great job at just 2 or 3 social media platforms.
2. Different social media platforms require different amounts of time If you have only 20 minutes a day to devote to social media and you only have a presence on Twitter, then you have plenty of time to make an impact and grow your brand presence. But that same 20 minutes isn’t going to go as far on Facebook, for example. Crafting 2-3 status updates a day, locating or creating an image or 2 for those updates, responding to comments and interacting as your page can take much longer than your allotted time. 
3. Schedule what you can in advance And use your favorite curation tools to assist you! To schedule social media updates, you can choose from popular tools like Hootsuite, Tweetdeck and Sprout Social. Buffer App is one of my favorites for steadily posting articles I’ve curated in a timed sequence. RSS tools like Dlvr.it will share the new blog posts from whatever RSS feeds you have added to your profile. I recommend scheduling multiple updates at once to make the most of your time.
4. Know what has to be done daily Believe it or not, not all your social media platforms necessitate daily activity! It probably seems like I’m contradicting a social media best practice here, but what I’m really trying to do is to be realistic about the typical time constraints on the average small business owner. Facebook and Twitter definitely need daily activity and monitoring (since those are the most used platforms by customers for questions or customer service). But Pinterest and Google Plus, for example, are good platforms to consider using every other day or so. Also, you’re likely to be more effective when spending 10 or 15 minutes a day, 2 or 3 times a week, versus just 5 minutes a day, everyday.
5. Know the popular times for each platform you use And use that knowledge to your advantage! Do you spend Saturday morning drinking coffee and checking to see what’s new on LinkedIn? If so, you’re visiting that platform during one of its peak times. Trying to fit some pinning into your day? Pinterest is actually busiest starting around 8pm in the evenings.

Organizing your social media duties along with the rest of your daily business tasks doesn’t need to feel like an unsurmountable feat. Working through these 5 steps will help you make better use of your time and feel like you have a better handle on your social media responsibilities.