30 Minutes A Day: Social Media Marketing for Busy People

The average adult spends 95 minutes on social media apps everyday. With just under four billion users across platforms, social media is a marketing behemoth that millions of creators use to share their work and build successful businesses.

Content creators and entrepreneurs are keenly aware of social media’s potential ability to expand their audience, generate brand awareness, and produce leads.

But let’s face it: social media marketing is time-consuming. No matter which way you look at it, researching your audience, creating content, and engaging with followers takes time.

Time, frankly, that content creators and entrepreneurs need for a million other things. Furthermore, social media platforms require content creators to publish content consistently — sometimes daily.

Failure to do so often results in less engagement and slowed growth. Creators end up feeling like they’re battling the algorithm, constantly trying to keep up with a machine…while working to build authentic connections with real people.

Far and wide, the legend of content batching has spread with its tantalizing promise: spend just a few hours each week on social media marketing, schedule your content, and forget about it.

Content batching is a helpful tool for many creators and small businesses. Yet we regularly talk to entrepreneurs who say that it doesn’t work for their brand. Time and again we’ve heard that batching content makes it:

• More difficult to engage and be present
• Less fun to create the content
• Harder to produce the same quality

If any of this resonates with you, we offer this guide as a solution. Here’s how to grow your business with social media marketing in just 30 minutes a day.

How to Make 30-Minutes Work for You

When you are able to spend less time on social media, you can spend more time creating outside of these platforms.

This will, in turn, provide you with more content to repurpose and promote on social media.

Growing your business with social media requires consistent presence on the platform. By simplifying and creating priorities, you will gain clarity on the best investment of your time.

Grow One Platform at a Time

Consider your audience and offerings, then determine which platform will be most likely to move you closer to your business goals. Start with this platform.

Once that channel is consistently producing conversions (users who leave social media for your offerings), then consider expanding your marketing channels.

Repurpose content when you do. This will allow you to spend the same amount of time producing content and scale up the time you spend engaging across platforms.

Plan to Do Less

In Greg McKowen’s book Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less, he remarks on the importance of slowing down and being willing to do fewer things, far better.

This approach is essential to successful social media marketing for solopreneurs and small businesses. How can you simplify your approach to make it sustainable for you?

On every social media platform, there is content that is high leverage.

For your platform, determine what content is most likely to produce results and focus on optimizing it.

For example: On Instagram and TikTok, short-form videos that use viral music or sound clips are buoyed by the algorithm and generally receive more views. Consider how you can use this to promote your brand and cater to your audience, see what works, and tweak to improve.

Know the Goal

Successful social media marketing is not gaining followers — it is converting passive followers into engaged audience members and potential customers.

It can be too easy to become wrapped up in the numbers game, constantly striving for more followers instead of building relationships.

The antidote to this is to know your goal. While you may want a million followers, the more immediate goal might be to:

• Make at least five sales a month
• Attract 20 new email subscribers
• Increase social media conversion rates 2%
• Add 10 community members or patrons

Whatever the goal, choose one that requires you to measure engagement, rather than passive viewing. While a large follower count means broad awareness, it’s more important to build a follower-base that’s actively participating with your content.

The Essential Steps of Social Media Marketing

Regardless of the platform, successful social media marketing requires four major components. This will look different depending on the platform, brand, and type of content. But the general process is the same across marketing channels.

Note: Each of the aspects below includes a daily time estimate. Set a timer for each phase to help keep yourself on track. This time estimate is meant to be a guide. We will discuss specifics for each platform in the next section.

Research (5 Minutes)

The research phase might include reviewing the competition, discovering popular hashtags, viewing Google Alerts, talking to clients or superfans, and generally participating in the greater community that your business serves.

The point of this phase is to acquire knowledge and ideas. Knowledge about what your ideal audience is looking for and how you can help them. Ideas about the kind of content you can create that will be successful.

Content Creation (15 Minutes)

One of the most time-consuming activities of social media marketing is creating the content. This will vary greatly depending on the type of content and platform. However, for most social media platforms, daily content can be created in a 15-minute block of time.

This might include filming and editing a video, creating an image or graphic, writing a thread or finding repurposable content. This step encompasses both the imagery and text needed to publish a post. When this step concludes, it’s time to publish the content.

Publishing (2 Minutes)

Publishing content takes a couple seconds. However, part of the publishing process is reviewing your work to ensure it’s ready to be published. Therefore, this step might include tagging people, adding your location, writing alt text, and ensuring the content is published correctly.

Outreach & Engagement (8 Minutes)

One of the most underutilized social media marketing strategies is outreach and engagement with the broader community your business seeks to serve. Instead of waiting for people to find you, this strategy involves engaging with the content others are producing.

This can be as simple as finding a hashtag on Instagram that’s relevant to your community, reviewing the most recent posts, and leaving a sincere well-thought out comment.

Warren Knight, founder of Think Digital First, spaces his 30-minutes-a-day strategically throughout the week. On Monday, he spends 60 minutes creating 7 days of content. Then he uses Hootsuite to schedule the content across his marketing channels. The rest of his time is broken up across the week. He spends three minutes, three times a day replying to messages. Two minutes each day retweeting and sharing content. Five minutes a day following new people, and another five minutes analyzing his success. He measures social media success by engagement and the number of new followers gained. However, he also measures the amount of website traffic referred by social platforms.

How you engage will vary from platform to platform. Regardless, the key is to be a positive force of encouragement and curiosity. This step’s goal isn’t to gain followers; it’s about building community by genuinely finding content you enjoy and boosting what others are doing.

The Formula: 30-Minutes of Daily Social Media Marketing

Now let’s dive into the details of how you can use your 30-minutes each day to effectively market your business across different social media platforms.

Keep in mind that it’s easier to scale your social media marketing to include other platforms if you’re repurposing content.

As you expand to market on additional platforms, you will need to scale up the time spent publishing and engaging across networks. Measure results to ensure the investment is returned.

Instagram

Instagram is a story-telling app wherein users share images and videos with text captions. Reels or videos and image carousels generate the most engagement on Instagram. Stories are a great way to connect with your most engaged followers and get direct feedback.

Instagram is one of the few social platforms that still use hashtags to organize content, and it’s recommended to include just 3-5 hashtags with each post.

• Research (5 minutes): Discover topics via related accounts, hashtags, and competition. Save sounds (for Reels) and collect hashtags.
• Content Creation (15 minutes): Write caption. Film, take photos, or design images. Edit.
• Publishing (2 minutes): Upload content, add caption, hashtags & other details. Share.
• Outreach & engagement (8 minutes): Explore related hashtags or locations. Find accounts in alignment with your ideal audience.

Engage with their content: like a few of their posts, leave a sincere and thoughtful comment on a post your ideal audience would engage with. If you want to start building a relationship with this person, send them a DM and be specific about what content you’re resonating with and why.

Twitter

Twitter is an app for conversations. Aside from creating useful and unique content, your time is best spent building relationships with those you seek to serve.

As you conduct research, you may find a conversation to which you can add value.

This can be a jumping off point — write down the value you can add and reply. This will retweet the conversation to your followers and potentially reach the original poster’s audience as well.

Don't be afraid to reach out directly to sincerely inquire about someone’s pain points, especially new followers. By providing free value in these ways, you can build trust and stronger connections.

• Research (8 minutes): Brainstorm topics, explore trending hashtags, review competition, discover relevant conversations.
• Content Creation (10 minutes): Write tweet or tweet thread. Create a graphic (optional). You might also include a video or direct traffic to your website, landing page, etc.
• Publishing (2 minutes): Create tweet; tag mentions, include hashtags (2-3), and publish.
• Outreach & engagement (10 minutes): Find conversations to which you can add value. Follow accounts your audience would love and engage with their content. Reply to mentions. ‘Like’ follower posts or retweet high-value content.

Facebook

Creatorpreneurs use Facebook (Meta) in a variety of ways.

Brands often use Facebook to promote products and direct traffic to their website. But Facebook’s algorithm favors on-site content; therefore, it’s important your strategy includes both. On-site content includes text, images, and videos.

Additionally, creators often use Facebook Groups to build trust and authority with a community of people who are interested in their specific niche.

• Research (5 minutes): Brainstorm ideas and topics. Consider questions you might ask, polls you might conduct, stories or behind-the-scenes content you could share. Review other companies and brands within your niche.
• Content Creation (10 minutes): Determine the type of content you will share. Write the text, and create videos or images. Grab the appropriate link if sharing one.
• Publishing (2 minutes): Build your post, add your text, and publish.
• Outreach & engagement (8 minutes): Respond to comments, participate in discussions, participate in Groups. Join a conversation and offer value.

Pinterest

Pinterest is a searchable platform that uses visuals to catch attention. A major advantage of Pinterest is the ability for users to click-through Pins to visit the attached link.

This allows businesses to create discoverable Pins (unlike many social platforms where the content stops being pushed after 24 hours) and send direct traffic directly to a website or blog.

Pinterest boards are used to organize content. Users can follow specific Pinterest boards or individual accounts. Pins should be optimized for search with relevant keywords. Creators can also use rich Pins that will feature extra information for recipes, articles, and products.

YouTube

YouTube is a searchable video platform. It requires a completely different strategy than other social media platforms, as most creators don’t post daily. Instead, videos average around 10 minutes in length, with plenty of outliers in either direction.

YouTube also has an ad-share revenue model that allows creators to monetize their videos with Google Adsense. However, YouTube is often utilized as a marketing tool. As with other platforms, create content that your ideal audience will find highly useful or inspiring.

The formula for working on a YouTube channel 30 minutes every day is drastically different from any other platform. Instead of spreading your 30 minutes across all tasks, choose the task you’re currently working on and move progress forward. Therefore, we’ve provided appropriate time estimates to match.

• Research (30 minutes): Brainstorm topics, conduct searches and discover keywords, review the competition and find knowledge gaps or content opportunities. Use Google Keyword Planner to create highly profitable videos.
• Content Creation (5 - 40 hours): Write the video script. Film content. Edit the video. Create a thumbnail.
• Publishing (15 minutes*): Add your title and description box text and links. Upload your thumbnail. Add other details, video elements and choose visibility. Save the video.
• Outreach & engagement (30 minutes): Include a call-to-action in your video or ask for suggestions. Reply and “heart” video comments. Create YouTube Shorts or host a Live.

*Does not include time to upload video.

TikTok

TikTok is the newest kid on the block that’s rapidly become one of the most popular social media apps. Responsible for the short-form video trend, TikTok allows creators to make videos up to three minutes long and share videos up to 10 minutes long.

Create a mix of short and long-form content and incorporate trends in your overall strategy. TikTok is more informal than other social media platforms, which allows creators to build stronger connections with their followers.

• Research (5 minutes): Brainstorm topics. Discover trends and find popular sounds. Consider what ‘hook’ you will use to grab the viewer's attention. Find hashtags.
• Content Creation (15 minutes): Film the video and edit. Add video effects, captions, text.
• Publishing (2 minutes): Upload content, add caption, hashtags & other details. Post.
• Outreach & engagement (8 minutes): Explore related hashtags. Find accounts in alignment with your ideal audience. Follow and engage with their content: leave sincere and thoughtful comments — become a fan.

Keep in mind that the time breakdowns above do not consider the time you can invest in various other features to connect with your audience, including Stories, Lives, and more.

Tanya Aliza has a unique approach: she spends 90 minutes once a month coming up with 30 pieces to use that month. On a daily basis, she spends: 5-10 minutes commenting, liking, and engaging with other people’s content. She spends another 5-10 minutes creating and publishing the social content. Finally, she spends the remaining 5-10 minutes conversing with those who engage with your content. Tanya has used social media to grow her business. One way she’s done this is by spending an additional hour specifically on the task of active asking and follow-up. While an hour of this isn’t do-able for everyone, consider spending an additional ten minutes directly engaging with prospective leads for the purpose of understanding their pain points and how you can help. This is especially important for those who sell directly on their socials.

Depending on the platform, you might consider allocating additional time to these tasks or reserving a day of the week to spend the 30 minutes on those tasks, instead of new content.

How to Create a Sustainable Social Media Marketing Strategy

For some creators, the mental weight of committing 30 minutes a day to social media marketing is far more manageable than spending half a day batching content.

For others, they enjoy making fresh content on the same day it’s published.

The key is to know yourself: How can you set yourself up for success? Create structures for who you are today, not the person you plan to wake up and be tomorrow. While it’s important to foster discipline as a creator, it’s just as important to take care of yourself.

Above all else, simplify, simplify, simplify.

Your time is best spent cultivating relationships. If you dread spending time on a social platform, consider building an audience somewhere else!

Focus on creating a social media marketing strategy that you look forward to executing.

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