People frequently ask me, “How much time do you spend on social media?”
It’s a fair question, but I’m not the best person to ask. Social media is part of what I do for my business, so I spend more time on it than the average business owner.
That said, I spend two hours or more each day on social media. But before you have heart failure, remember that I’m a blogger. We spend more time than average because we have to write our posts, and we probably read more blogs than non-bloggers.
So how do I do it? And what can you learn from me to help you?
Simple. It’s all in the tools and time management.
I don’t keep up with social media in one or two long blocks of time. I spread it out over the day with short blocks of time that fit between meetings or larger tasks.
For example, in the morning, I check Twitter and catch up on blog posts. Mostly, I do that from my phone, sometimes before I’ve even gotten out of bed. Very luxurious, I tell you.
I do most of my Twitter and Facebook interaction from my phone because I can be anywhere. Waiting on a meeting, waiting on a phone call, as a short break to clear my mind. Sometimes, like today, while I’m eating lunch.
If you follow me on Twitter, you might think I’m on it all day. But I’m not. I use scheduling on Hootsuite for iPhone to space out my tweets. That means I can do a 20 minute session and have tweets and RTs going out for the next couple of hours.
Twitter recently added a new feature, which has been great. Whenever I receive a Twitter @Mention, I get a text to my phone. So I can reply to those as they happen instead of a couple of times a day.
See why I love my smart phone so much?
What about blogging? I write each post the day before. Then in the morning, I just need to do a quick edit and publish. Again, I use Hootsuite to schedule the tweets about my blog. 7:00 AM isn’t a big time for US Twitter people, so I’d rather have the tweet go out in the late morning. Scheduling makes that happen. It also means I’m never sitting in the morning, staring at a blank screen, thinking, “What to write about today?”
As for reading blogs, I use Google Reader mostly. All the blogs I’m subscribed to all in one place. If I have a few minutes, I go to my Google Reader page and see what’s new. I also use an iPhone app, Byline, to check blogs on my phone.
So it’s all about using good tools and finding those few minutes a day when you can dip in, read some stuff and then get back out and on with your next task or meeting.
Anyone else want to share how they time manage social media?
Tags: iPhone, social media, task management, time management
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Great post – I do it a bit differently. While I also spread time over the day, I moved from “Network Focus” to “People Focus”. That means rather than scanning each network every time -guessing- there may be something, I go through my Xeesm (A social media management tool) and visit people I’m focusing on in the networks they are in.
It moves my thinking from a “watch and see” to a “active engagement”. Obviously I browse around once in a while but loose less time in doing so.
Just another way of doing things.
Axel, excellent approach. I do something similar by focusing on my lists in Twitter and on Facebook. I’ve got lists set up by a hierarchy of importance, and I check them in that order. Good suggestion. Thanks for contributing!
@Juli – yes, that’s another good way to do it. The problem I discovered is that many people hang out on so many networks. There is an interesting collection of reports on Facebook – that shows how people search for you and your profiles. We may think Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter is it – but not after you see this.
http://www.facebook.com/pages/XeeSM/109505987532
Very different people with very different demographics.