As young PR pros, social media has grown into our everyday routines, used as a tool for both personal and professional use. With social media growing ever so rapidly, it is sometimes hard to keep up with the constant changes and advancements.

Producing engaging content and adhering to guidelines to make sure your post gets as much traction as possible can be overwhelming. Thankfully, there are ways you can simplify your social life on both a personal and professional level.

1. Maintain your online presence. Follow people on Twitter, clean up your Facebook, update your LinkedIn, and keep your profiles public – these are the easiest ways to be found via social media.

2. Schedule, schedule, schedule. In maintaining your online presence, you need to make sure you have time to keep the profiles listed above up-to-date. Pre-scheduling posts has made every community manager’s life easier, but it can also help your personal profiles so you don’t have to worry about losing your online impressions. There are numerous free online tools you can use for this including TweetDeck and Hootsuite!

3. There’s an app for that! If This Then That, LastPass, Evernote, Hootlet, etc. are only a few of the apps that can help simplify your social life. Useful for business and personal profiles, there is the right app for you depending on what you’re looking to post. My favorite is the “recipes” created on IFTTT which automatically posts your Instagram photos to your Twitter using the proper links so you can see the image.

4. Share, share, share. Sharing content! There’s nothing like creating traffic and sharing what people are saying online to get your message across. Always give credit where credit is due by tagging authors or publications in which will also help create more engagement for your profile.

5. Always measure up. Those of us who don’t work in social media don’t think to measure how our online presence is doing. Being able to measure your content helps you to see what posts are working and how to improve your content for the future. This can been seen through many online tools such as Klout, Twitter and Facebook Analytics, Hootsuite, Sysomos, and Sprout Social just to name a few.

What have you done to simplify your social media presence? 

Marcy McMillan is the Marketing Communications & Events Coordinator for York University’s Campus Services and Business Operations department. When she’s not working, you can find Marcy discovering new restaurants in downtown Toronto, attending and writing about events or spending some time at the public library. Find her on Twitter @marcy113 or visit her site.