One of the most attractive aspects of social media for small businesses is that it’s low to no cost to the business, but you would be wrong. As a small business owner your time is always worth something even if you cannot afford to pay yourself.

So when you spend hours working on you Facebook account or Twitter, time can slip away and cost you money in the long run.

If you are going to use social media make the marketing and business-building work for you. For this is an investment in your business. As any small  business owner can tell you the devil is in the details, so be organized is a must.

• Setting a schedule you do not have to add a new post to every social network every day. This takes up a lot of time from your daily schedule and other tasks undone. It is not important how often you post so when you do, make sure it is valuable content that will generate a good response from your fans and followers.

• Don’t wait to the last minute, you don’t do this in business for if you did you wouldn’t. By creating  a content stockpile this will eliminate any stress of having to come up with something on the spot from one week to the next. Then, when the time comes to update your posts, you can just select something from the pile and post!

• Link your networks. When you are doing things on your own, it can be hard to find the time to post to multiple accounts. You can link each of your profiles so that when you post on one account, say your Facebook page, then it is also sent out to the others and vice versa. Tools like Buffer, Tweetdeck and even Facebook Scheduled Posts can make this happen in the background for you.

• Use social networks for customer service. Many small businesses are starting to take advantage of social media as a way to provide better customer service. You can quickly and easily respond to any issues or comments that customers leave on social networks rather than having to wade through e-mails or have customers waiting to speak to someone on the phone.

• Get automated. One bonus of having a content stockpile is that you can use tools like Socialoomph, Buffer and Timely for Twitter to schedule its release automatically. You can schedule certain things, but you still need to go back and make responses where needed and take time to actually interact with your fans.

• Combined engagement. Other tools make it simple to monitor and update your accounts from one spot. You can use Hootsuite or Tweetdeck to create a dashboard that lets you handle multiple social media accounts from a single platform, saving you time.

• Create alerts for important topics such as your company name, product names and competitors. Create Twitter Lists of your most important customers, partners and media contacts so you can monitor their activity in real time.

• Set up topic alerts. Save yourself time from searching for industry news articles by setting up a Google Alert for specified topics. You can search through the results for news that relates to your business. When you find something of interest, you can share it with your followers.

Social media is going to be an important marketing tool for businesses for a long time to come. With useful tools and planning, you can save plenty of time on social networks while still getting the most benefits from them.