Has social media taken over your time? Do you find yourself living in reaction to social media notifications and email pings like Pavlov’s Dogs, jumping to attention each time you hear a “ding” from a notification?  If so, it’s time to take back your life and start automating your email and social media interactions… as nowadays, we have become so attached to our digital devices that we barely have any down time.

Indeed, we can spend so much time behind our computers that we don’t even realise we are still hooked in, when sat on the train or even with our partner at dinner – tapping away on our phones, and this digitally connected world we live in, can be incredibly harmful to living a balanced life particularly in terms of our emotional wellbeing and social lives.  

One of the best ways to ensure we find the time to enjoy a more balanced life is to automate your digital marketing by creating a network of automated process, systems, and apps to automatically take care of marketing tasks such as following up on emails, posting to facebook, and so on.

This will not only free up physical time, it will give you peace of mind, and a sense of certainty that things are being taken care of.

Furthermore, rather than having to deal with the headaches that can come with technology, web design and social media marketing reach out and get some advice from experts in their field who can act like an armco barrier in that they can help you avert disaster and keep you on the right track.  Essentially, what might take you three hours to figure out could be done in three minutes with access to the right expertise.

Tim Ferriss, a well known productivity expert, talks about the importance of automation in our work lives so we can focus on managing our business rather than being trapped working within the business.  Further to this, he urges us to go one step further and outsource many of our more menial digital tasks to a virtual assistant.

In this article we’re going to look at automating a number of the most time consuming digital tasks such as being inundated by emails, following up on sales leads, and managing our social media presence.

When it comes to email, there are plenty of time-starved business owners frantically sending out an email to a customer thanking them for their order and letting them know when it will be shipped.  The key point with automation is that it frees your time to be working ‘on’ the business at a strategic level rather than ‘in’ the business where you are wasting your time doing the same job as a low-level employee.  You could use something like mailchimp in order to start automating your emails at very low cost.

Managing your social media marketing campaigns can be extremely time consuming.  Many business owners consider hiring a virtual assistant in order to manage this time consuming task though there there are several free apps such as hootsuite and buffer that can help you automate this task.

In summary, it’s time to take back your time and put your digital marketing activities on autopilot rather than live life chained to your device.