Time Drain, Heat Exhaustion, Getting Off Track With My Social Media Calendar!

Ok, I it was 110 degrees at one point in Riverside, California so I had no thoughts of doing any type of work, for clients or my businesses. It was just to damn hot! So what did I do? Surfed the universe of social media instead of driving to the beach. Yes this was much easier than trying to concentrate on anything else, even in the comfort of my air conditioned home office, i just couldn't get over the heat.

As I jumped from blog to blog, tweet to tweet, connection to connection, and fan page to fan page (ok, so I covered blogging, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook) I realized how much of a rabbit hole I had gotten into. And what did I learn? A lot! And here are my rough statistics.

1. In less than 5 minutes on HootSuite, I saw over 300 tweets on my two business accounts @concentricmktg, @gayincognito. That was in 5 minutes. I didn't say I read all of them, that is what I saw scroll past my eyes. That's 300 tweets from all of my Tweeps (not sure that's the right term). Now multiple that by all of their Tweeps that are following them and you get the picture. Insane!!!! But I got good blog ideas and made some quick connections.  Ok, so it took more like 30 minutes to do all that.
   
2. In a little over an hour I visited more than 100 blogs, read about 50 posts, commented on 10 and found ideas for my blog. Ok, so a little more productive. Oh and made a couple of connections.
   
3. Visited Linkedin, responded to my "In Box" messages, did a quick run through my groups, commented and ticked a few people off with my comments - another 30 minutes.
4. Did my part of being an active Facebook user (defined as visiting the site at least once per month and have over 130 friends), commented, posted updates, and used Facebook as a search engine - 1 hour plus.

So you ask, what is my point? While I fully support Social Media, unless it is over 100 degrees out and you have nothing better to do, then have a plan for using Social Media to grow your business. Ok, so I gave myself liberty today and went outside of my normal process.  And what is that process? Here it is really quickly:

• Tweet 10 - 20 valuable Tweets per day - focus being "Valuable Tweets" - for my sites. Divided up between three time slots per day - Morning, Mid-Day, Evening - should only take 10 minutes at most per session, so 30 minutes total.
• Check-In on LinkedIn twice per day. Only post one status update, use a calendar to check on groups and comment on two group postings per day. Total time - less 15 minutes. Post a question for a group or in a status update add 5 minutes.
  
• Make 2 new LinkedIn connections a day that you add value to. If you add value to the connection then they will connect back to you...hopefully with value. - Less than 15 minutes.
• Touch base with Facebook Friends - this is off the clock for the most part unless you are connecting back to a friend that has commented on one of your "Pages." I use, as most of you probably do, Page for my businesses. Review comments, make sure my blogs fed to the pages, answer any discussion questions, post any updates, thank people for "Liking" a page. Time spent - 15 minutes at most.
• Writing my blog posts 20 - 30 minutes per three blogs but each blog has it's day. Ok so I am cheating because research time isn't in there, but I plan my posts out on the weekend or when I have down time.

Sum total for a day of social media 2 hours split throughout the day in three segments of 30 to 40 minutes each...if even that. Most the time, I spend less than 1.5 hours per day.

So that's how you manage Social Media...or at least that's how I do it.