In the nearly 5 years Kristin and I have had our business, we’ve been asked several times how we manage our own marketing tasks. Many social media consultants find themselves in a unique predicament in that we’re hired by other small business owners to manage their social media, website, and business blogging tasks because they don’t have the time in their days to do so. But we are small business owners ourselves, so we need to find a way to complete our clients’ work while also making time for our own small business’ marketing needs.

Kristin and I are co-owners, so – yes – we have the ability to split up tasks between the two of us, which is something an independent professional or solopreneur wouldn’t have the option to do. But I think many of these tips and ideas can be applied to those single owners as well. Plus, I know that several small business owners rely on at least 1 contractor for assistance in various business tasks, so perhaps some division of online marketing duties is possible there.

7 Tips for Effectively Executing Online Marketing Tasks for your Small Business

• Divide by social media platform For example, I head up our Facebook page while Kristin tackles the Twitter account. If you are a solopreneur, consider how many accounts you can reasonably handle before creating new ones. You wouldn’t want your social presence to reflect poorly on your capabilities simply because you have too much on your plate.
• Divide by online marketing task Make one person in charge of one task such as your email newsletter while putting the other person in charge of a different task like scheduling and posting your business blogs.
• Trade off writing blog posts Each week, Kristin and I write 1 blog post a piece, and then we take turns writing our Friday link roundup posts.
• Use scheduling and posting tools We are big believers in organic activity, but know that scheduling and auto-posting tools are essential in order to be effective with your daily time. For example, I manually post our Monday and Wednesday blog posts to our LinkedIn Company page, but Kristin fills up her Buffer to post additional articles to our LinkedIn Company page for every day of the week.
• Divide by what’s easiest for each person If sitting down to schedule multiple Facebook updates at one time is preferable for 1 person while tweeting from the phone is a better fit for the other person, go with it! Everyone has their most and least favorite marketing tasks – embrace them!
• Only have a presence if you can maintain it The same advice goes for our clients. We always tell them that you are better off doing 1 or 2 things really well instead of barely managing to keep up with 4 or 5 things. If you want to experiment with a new platform to see if it’s a good fit for your business, start a personal account there before diving in on behalf of your brand.
• When one person is slammed, have the other person step in Sometimes life gets in the way of work, and you need to lean on someone else to get it all done. Make sure both people have current passwords or admin privileges to all social media accounts so support can be given as needed.

Kristin and I both feel very lucky that we work so well together and really can hand off any type of work that needs to get done, to the other person if needed. What specifically works for us might not be what works best for you, but we do find that the “divide & conquer” management approach is effective, however you set it up.