by Sue Ennis, Business Center Marketing
Reserve “just enough” time – block your calendar for social media time and treat it like a regular meeting. You start and you finish on time. Choose a time that works for you. For some, it’s first thing in the morning over coffee, for others it’s an afternoon break from the daily routine. Keep the effort short, but frequent, to stay on top of opportunities and to remain active.
Keep to your checklist– login and stay on track with purpose. Update your status, share interesting news, forward on relevant news, answer messages, accept/send invitations, check social mentions and reply to comments. Soon the checklist will be engrained in your DNA, but stay focused. As we all know, without a roadmap, it’s easy to get side-tracked and out on a tangent that’s just a time waster of no value. Have a checklist for weekly and monthly tasks to ensure every drum gets a beat along the way.
Use the power of replication – link your profiles to each other so you can update from one place and keep momentum going on another. Blog posts can be set up to auto-populate as news on your main site homepage, in your LinkedIn profile. LinkedIn status updates can automatically be shared to your Twitter following. Caution – Do not rely on auto population more than this. Tools found at www.ping.fm can help you send updates across your various platform, but be sure to login to each and personally review the activity to gain the true benefits of social media – the personal connection to others. Keep the “social” in social media!
Analyze your effects – review what information gets passed along and focus on where you see the most results. Identify a trend of what’s meaningful to your audience and what makes them act in a way that is revenue generating. As you work to build relationships and credibility, keep the end goal in mind. Quantity is not where it’s at, the quality of what you send and the strength of your social media engagement is where the positive ROI is found. Be smart and keep to your strategic social media roadmap. Use tools such as www.tweeteffect.com to see when people drop you or join you.
Remain Streamlined – with thousands of social media platforms and exponentially more tools and apps, it’s easy to take on more that you’d humanly be able to manage. Revert back to your core platforms, your objectives and strategy to remain focused at all times. A solid, frequently updated presence on LinkedIn, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube and maintaining a blog or destination where you group your posts is more than optimal to achieve the benefits of social media…and the positive ROI.
