Using social media for business requires you to effectively manage your time. After all, as a business you have to be creating billable hours of work or selling your products. You want to use social media to market your business, but you had better be pretty smart with your time.
This Thursday June 20, 2013, I will be giving a talk entitled “Effective Social Media Time Management” at the “Its All Social” social media conference for business in Truro, Nova Scotia. This talk will introduce to business owners effective social media strategies that will help them manage their social media efforts throughout the day. Here’s a sample caption of what I will be sharing about…
“As a business, you only have some much time. You have lots to do to make your business run successfully in the run of the day. Learn how you can use your time smartly and effectively to market to your customers with social media. You don’t want more work, you want better results.”
As a business, you want to have a social media presence throughout the day. You have to consider that people use social media at different points of the day as well as people using social media in different time zones. Not everybody is on social media through the day.
Each social network will have its own posting frequency. Each network has a different group on there as well. You need to take this into account when you post to each social network.
For example, you should post a Facebook at least once a day. But you don’t want to post too often and annoy your Facebook friends. You have to post in an ideal time zone during the day. You might even get to post three things on Facebook through the day. You need to make sure that they are well-spaced out and that you very the type of material to post.
On Twitter, you can post many times per day. But you should allow about an hour between your Twitter posts or tweets. This gives room for your message or Tweet to be seen. You don’t want to send a Tweet out and then move people to your next Tweet because you posted too quickly.
To give your business a fighting chance to appear across the different time zones and throughout the day, you’re going to have to use third-party applications to send out your socially posts throughout the day. As a business, you will have to learn to use applications like HootSuite, Buffer, Twylah and others as well. They will allow you to line up your social media posts to go out at different intervals during the day.
These applications will allow you to have a presence throughout the day, but that does not mean that your work is done yet. You need to monitor your social media networks throughout the day either on a computer, a tablet or your mobile device. When people reach out to you, you need to be there to respond.
As a business, you need to understand the social media is not just about throwing your content out there. It’s about answering people’s questions and engaging others when they reach out to you after they read your content that you posted earlier. Business has always been a two-way street, and social media is no different.
I see many businesses make the mistake of just scheduling messages to go through the day and not responding to their customers and others. This ends up being nothing less than broadcasting. Broadcasting is one way advertising, and it doesn’t cut it anymore in today’s economy.
So we can make our social media easier by some degree of automation. But that does not mean you automate everything on your social media as a business. You need to be there when customers ask you questions, when they reach out to you, or simply when they say hi.
My talk at this conference will introduce business to effective time management strategies for social media, but I will also introduce them to effective monitoring methods. Businesses need to see customer responses and respond to them. For a business, a smart phone could be a good way to monitor customer interactions throughout the day. It does not have to be complicated, but it needs to be done.
I love to have your comments on this topic. Please post them below. I look forward to hearing from you. And as always, have a great business day. Wish you great success.
