One of the biggest obstacles for business owners engaging in social media is the time factor. At my workshops the most commonly asked question is – How do I fit in social media? How do I find time for social media?
So here are my five tips to help you fit social media into your already busy day;
1. Decide how much time you will spend on social media a day.
Sounds simple – but this is the golden rule. If you don’t have a time frame you can get sucked into the wonderful world of blogs, tweets, viral videos and search stats and not surface for hours…
Decide whether you will spend 15 minutes, half an hour or an hour – and stick to it. Block it out in your diary – just as you would an important meeting. And when your time is up; stop.
2. Set up a routine
Your routine could be that first thing in the morning, with a coffee in hand, is your social media time. (This works for me – but for others it’s after lunch or in the evening).
During this time you might scan all the blogs you subscribe to, read the interesting ones, tweet them, or comment on them. You might scan through all your friend’s tweets; retweet the good ones and reply to others, and add your own tweets. You might scan through all your search feeds and jump into relevant conversations. Or you might spend the time writing a blog post on a particular day; whatever it is, make it a habit.
3. Use social media management tools
There are two very useful tools that will help you manage your social media immensely; Tweetdeck and a Feed Reader.
- Tweetdeck is like a dashboard – at a glance you can view your friends’ tweets, your direct messages, any mentions of you, you can add in your searches – or customise it to suit your needs. As well as making it easy to tweet and retweet, you can post to multiple twitter accounts, your Facebook Business page and your Linkedin status from here.
- Feed reader – a feed reader like Pageflakes or Netvibes as your internet browser homepage means at glance you can view all the updated blog feeds you subscribe to, and all your search feeds (eg Google alerts, twitter search, etc). You don’t have to visit every blog or website – definitely a time saver.
I’m not a fan of automating your social media – it’s hardly ‘social’ then; it’s more robotic or spammy – but a tool like twitterfeed allows you to feed your latest blog post to your twitter stream (and you can even add in a prefix to appear on each tweet like; New blog post), which does save you time.
4. Give up something else
Is there an area in your business that you could divert your time away from? For example, instead of creating an ad campaign, use that time for social media, or instead of travelling to, and attending, a networking function use that time for social media.
5. Get some help with your social media
Many hands make light work. Be open to your employees contributing to aspects of your social media that interest them, whether it’s monitoring mentions or tweeting.
Invite guest bloggers to contribute to your blog; they could be colleagues, suppliers or customers. Create some guest blog guidelines so they’re aware of the tone and preferred content of your blog. Their contributions could add a new dimension to your blog – and your contributors get to feel part of your community too.
By Fiona Powell. Fiona blogs at www.chiefette.com
