LinkedIn, like any other social media channel, can take considerable time to manage. Whether you’re an agency or freelancer managing social media for clients, a business managing their own social media or someone who simply wants to generate better results from LinkedIn, there are various LinkedIn tools that can help improve your productivity considerably.

So whether you have a LinkedIn profile or Company Page – or several for that matter! – to manage, here are some of the best ways to save time and boost your productivity.

How to better schedule your LinkedIn content

Social media scheduling used to be very simple: you write the update, you pick the date and time and the update is good to go.

However, social media scheduling has evolved quite a lot in recent years, with more and more useful features popping up.

Depending on the tool you use, you now can:

• Repeat an update automatically as many times as you want
• Create content queues where you add as many updates as you want and the tool simply published them for you (at times you set or automatically)
• Create separate content queues for automatic publishing and republishing; this is probably the most useful scheduling feature as you can organise all updates into different queue categories and set separate publishing times for each category
• Automatically post updates at the best possible times (when more of your audience is online)

However, the most effective scheduling option is using different content queues.

One way to save time scheduling your updates comes from Hootsuite, a popular social media management tool – Auto Scheduling.

With this feature, you can save time scheduling by simply turning on the Auto Schedule feature when you upload a new LinkedIn update:

Once turned on, the tool will automatically post your update at an optimal time – a time when your audience is online and when you have a gap in your schedule; this way, you can ensure you’re constantly posting new content without having to manually check your social media calendar to see when you do/don’t have updates scheduled.

How to save time scheduling 3^rd party content

To break up all of your own updates with other interesting content, it’s a great idea to share relevant 3^rd party content on a regular basis (i.e. content created by others), such as:

• Relevant news from your industry
• Educational how-to guides
• Entertaining or funny content
• And any other interesting content that would be relevant to your target audience

That said, curating content can be a very time-consuming task, especially if you want to make sure the content you share is fresh, of a high quality and preferably already getting some attention on social media.

One good option here is Sprout Social, it offers 2 options for curating content:

• Set up RSS feeds of your preferred publications and blogs to have it pull content automatically from them and publish them in your stead
• Or the second option is to use their “Find Content” feature – which you can find under the Publishing tab – to find relevant content:

As you can see in the above screenshot, you can select the date range you prefer (the more recent they are, the better), as well as select various categories (the categories are very diverse so you’re bound to find what you need).

You’ll also be able to see how many shares the update got on different social network so you can gauge how popular the content is; once you find something good, simply click on “send to compose” to edit your update and schedule it out.

How to save time responding to comments and messages on LinkedIn

A good social media strategy – and that holds very true for LinkedIn – is to engage other users regularly, as well as respond to any comments and messages in a timely manner. However, the more people you get engaging with you, the more time it takes you to respond every day.

There are numerous tools that can help with this, each with their own solutions. All of the tools I’ll talk about here have a social inbox where all comments go so that you can see them all in one place:

• Sprout Social lets you see all of your comments in one place so that you can easily respond to them; plus, if you work as part of a team, you can see if another team mate already replied. You can also see a list of a users’ past comments on your previous posts which helps make sure you’re properly personalizing the message back. And finally, you can tag, organise and filter your messages to make them easier and faster to manage overall
• Hootsuite, like the other tool, has a social inbox where you can see and manage all comments; you can label your comments and you can see a full history of comments/the post thread so you can respond accordingly. One of the bigger focuses though is on teamwork; you can use the Hootsuite Inbox to easily assign updates, see which ones are assigned to you, which are unassigned (and therefore might need your attention) to help save time when managing LinkedIn as a team:

Conclusion

There are various ways that you can save time managing your LinkedIn profile or Company Page:

• Choose the best ways to schedule or queue your updates in order to save more time, based on your updates volume
• Find quality curated content faster and more easily

Manage your comments and inbox from one place and use time-saving features like team management features and “saved replies” to save more time.