How to Effectively Use Your Social Media Time

Interacting on social media channels may seem daunting but if you manage your time effectively and in an organized way, it may be much less oppressive and cumbersome than it needs to be. It all depends on the approach that you decide to take.

Getting the most out of your time on social media channels

A common complaint from business people (and other people as well) is that interacting on social media channels is daunting and very time-consuming. Actually, neither of those have to be true necessarily. In fact, if you spend between 30 minutes to an hour a week interacting on social media, that will be more than enough and you may be surprised at how much you accomplish for your business in that amount of time.

If you spend about 30 minutes to an hour of your time doing other things during your week, that time can go by in the blink of an eye. If you can get over the psychological hump, you probably won’t feel like that amount of time to spend on social media is anything at all and you will get so much out of it. So, now it is time for you to work out your organizational strategy. 

How much time do you spend on social media each day right now? 

You may not realize it but you may be spending more time on social media each day than you realize. If you are like the average person, you are already spending a large chunk of time each day on social media. That doesn’t mean that you are spending all of the time on social interactions. Of course, some of those interactions are professional.

What are the responsibilities of a social media manager?

The social media manager has many different responsibilities and how and in what order the manager fulfills those responsibilities may affect the outcome of the 30 to 60 minutes that you spend a week. They are:

• Planning your social media activities.
• Curating content, when appropriate.
• Writing content.
• Deciding when you will post a particular piece of content.
• Responding to comments that are posted in response to your content.
• Engaging your readers in any number of ways.
• Solving the problem of your online connections.
• Paying close attention to your company’s analytics

Now that you have a solid list of all of your responsibilities as social media manager, you need to look carefully at the list and determine which items on the list are the most important for your particular business. Now it is time to prioritize those items on the list. You may find it productive and effective if you can categorize some of the items and put them in bundles. If you can do that, you may be able to tackle some of them at once and then you can work through your list that way. If you can manage to tackle the items on your list in that way, the task may not seem so overwhelming.

Now, sticking with the 30 minutes-a-day concept, you may wish to break it down in the following way: For the first five minutes, you should gather information, you should spend the next 15 minutes reading the information, and you should interact online for the last 10 minutes. Wow, you have just used up 30 minutes. Didn’t it go fast? Of course, there is nothing stopping you from spending a little more than 30 minutes on your social media interactions, if you feel that you want to do so.

Conclusion

Once you get comfortable interacting on social media, the time will go even more quickly and more productively. It is important that you think about it not as an extra activity but as an important part of your work. Your social media marketing strategy (and that definitely includes online interactions) is a vital part of your overall marketing strategy and you have known that since you started your business.

There are many useful, effective tools that you can use to enhance your experience and your productivity. With a little research, you will discover the tools that work best for you and for your business. Along the way, you will discover that posting at certain times will work better for you than others. You will start to develop a formula that works well for you and that brings in the most (high-quality) traffic that you can hope to gather. The advice that was given here is valuable and if you follow it, it will help you to bring your business to the next level and beyond. 

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