Social Media Leaps

Time Management

Maintaining Your Presence

With social media, getting started might be the easy part. Our goal is to not only get you started on using these tools, but also to help you find ways to maintain your presence and grow your reach. And, sometimes it’s not easy. You are already busy – that’s the nature of being in a small organization. Social media strategies should help you and your business – not just keep you busy updating Twitter feeds, Facebook status and blog entries. But, how do you get there? How can you avoid the “time sink” that it has the potential to become in an already overcrowded day?

First, you need to acknowledge that this is going to take some additional time. No one should mislead you into believing that it won’t take more time than you are spending online today. In fact, you can spend anywhere from minutes to tens of hours per week. (The “How to boost your productivity…” link at the end of this section is a great summary of how to think about your time investment.) But, if you think carefully about your engagement and stay focused on your goals, over time you should begin to see results that justify your investment. We talk further about measuring return on investment for social media later in other places on this site.

To keep you on track, we’re offering some basic tips that we’ve assembled on managing your time, sourcing and creating content, staying interesting and becoming more efficient with the way you use social media tools.

Managing your time on social media

One of the biggest objections we hear about getting involved with social media as an individual, business or organization (beyond the knowledge gap) is the fear of time commitment. One of your best defenses against wasting time on social media is a good offense on structuring your effort.

There is a lot of content on time management and social media on the web. Google it and you can waste lots of time reading about how to manage your time! To help you avoid that loop, we’ve provided our perspective on the key take-aways.

1. Keep your goals in front of you (literally).

In our discussion about social media strategy, we suggested a focused set of goals. Keeping focused on your goals and putting them in front of you (literally) as you get started will help you with some of the early discipline that will be important in establishing your routines. Continue to remind yourself to do things that are in sync with your goals. If you don’t have a clear connection between how you are spending your time online and the goals you want to accomplish, it’s likely you are wasting time!

2. Limit your attention.

Especially as you get started, don’t try to use all of the various platforms and get connected to everyone or everything. You’ll certainly want to register on key platforms, but just get active on one at a time. Build your profile, check it regularly, listen to the conversation and get a feel for the give and take of a social media dialogue. Understand the functionality of the tool you are working in and determine if there is a fit between the tool and your business goals. Then, wade in as you feel more comfortable and add other tools when you are ready.

3. Plan your social media efforts into your day.

Your work on social media shouldn’t be outside of the day-to-day things you need to do to keep your business or organization moving forward. As such, those efforts need to be planned into your day.

Start by planning a total of 2 hours during the week and one hour per weekend. We suggest four, 15 minute time blocks and one, 1 hour time slot during the week. While you may find out that the total time needs to be adjusted up or down (likely up), this is a good way to start.

The short time slots are for checking sites, responding to messages and scanning interesting content or news feeds. The long time slots are to create content, explore some new territory and plan your efforts and goals for the next week. The “batch processing” article in the resources section below is an interesting way of thinking about how to manage these time slots.

4. Pick the right time of day.

When are you the freshest and most able to tackle new things and process information effectively? That’s the time of day you should choose to devote to learning about social media. Also, make sure you can shut the door, ignore the phone and avoid other distractions during that time. (Remember, focus on the goals you have).

5. Keep track of your time.

Make notes in your electronic calendar about how you will use the time you have blocked off to advance your social media efforts. This will serve as an informal log of the time you’re spending and will hold you “accountable” to yourself to get something done during your allocated time. You should review the log once a week to ensure you are keeping to your commitments and moving towards your business goals. Modify how you spend your time each week and the amount of time you spend based on your progress.

6. Decide when to “Check,” “Participate,” or “Create.”

These are all different levels of engagement with social media. Stick to the plan for your session. “Checking” involves reviewing posts, comments and messages and responding where necessary. “Participating” is updating your status, becoming involved in discussion threads or community activities and expanding your network. “Creating” is developing content for your blog, Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn accounts and sharing your content with your network or community.

7. Remember to Stop.

It’s easy to get sucked into doubling or tripling the time you spend on social media. Try setting an alarm that goes off five minutes before your session should end. You can certainly reset it, but at least be conscious about the time you are spending and each time the alarm rings, check in with yourself on whether or not your work is still focused on your goals. When you finish, tune out and move on to other work.