Tried and True Ways to Squeeze Social Media Marketing Into Your Day
At the beginning of your work day, you probably have a routine that looks something like this:
Check your personal email. Check Facebook. Waste a little too much time on Facebook. Check your business email. Look at Instagram on your phone. See if anything new has popped up in your personal email. Start working.
The above is about 30 minutes of my morning. One thing I have been making a concerted effort to do is squeeze in a little social media marketing, too. I don’t mean putting together an entire campaign, but just interacting – liking, commenting, retweeting, and generally joining the conversation. I figure that if I have time to keep up with my friends on Facebook and Instagram, I have 10 – 20 minutes to do social media marketing for my business.
Here’s what I’ve been doing:
Scheduling it
After I do all the email-checking in the morning, I immediately do some social media marketing – it’s on my schedule. By working it into my schedule, I am less likely to accidentally-on-purpose “forget” to do it.
Sticking to 2-3 networks
I use Twitter and LinkedIn for marketing, as my audience is there (I’ll be expanding to Instagram soon). If your audience is not on a social network, don’t use it! Maybe your audience is on Pinterest and Instagram. Maybe they’re on Tumblr and Snapchat. Go where your people are, not where you think they might be.
Using a social media dashboard
I’ve been using Hootsuite for years, but there are plenty of other social media dashboards out there that are just as great. I follow conversations, updates, and mentions from Hootsuite, which saves me a heckuva lot of time.
Though I share the same information on both Twitter and LinkedIn, I take the time to write a longer intro to anything I share on LinkedIn since I have more space. I usually autoschedule everything I share in order to reach as large an audience as possible.
Listening
This is actually on my to-do list. I had been using Google Alerts, but I want a more elegant social listening tool to help me keep track of conversations so I can jump in and offer my advice (never a sales pitch!).
What do you do squeeze social media marketing into your busy schedule?
