Truly Managing Your Social Media

Contrary to what you might think, it is not difficult to manage social media for business effectively. If you can commit to 20 to 30 minutes a day, you will be golden. It doesn’t take more than that for success.

As a business owner, there are many things that you need to accomplish throughout your workday. If you are efficient and mindful of not wasting time on the majority of your business activities, you will be able to accomplish everything that you need to in a given day. Of course, there will be days when you are not as productive as other days. On the whole, however, you should be able to accomplish a great deal. It is very important to try not to get distracted by other things, if possible.

Be organized

If you are going to successfully manage your social media activities, it is critical that you are as organized as possible. If you commit to being disciplined and as organized as is humanly possible, you will begin to see that a rhythm will develop. Once you get into a routine that you can count on (and one that really works), it will become less of a chore and you won’t even notice the effort that you are making.

There are several ways in which you can start to get organized.

Identify your key social media areas

You need to review the social media channels with which you connected over the past year and identify a handful that worked the most effectively for your business. It may be a bit of a challenge because social media makes so much information easily available to you. If you choose more than 4 or 5 channels, you may find that you are overwhelmed. It is better to choose fewer channels and be accurate than to choose more and not have the ability to really pinpoint the information and turn it into something that you can use for your business. Once you have been able to identify those channels, you can focus on working them and getting the most out of them for the benefit of your business that you can. They will serve you well.

Prioritize your activities

As you are arranging your schedule for the day, you should think about the most effective time to work with your social media channels so that they yield the most positive results for your business. A “to do” list is an excellent organization tool and until you really get into the swing of managing your social media interactions, you may want to rely on that. At the end of the day, you want to be left with the feeling that you have been successful with your social media activities. It is important to set realistic goals for your business when it comes to social media. If your goals are too ambitious, you may not be able to accomplish them and you will then be in a position of potentially not accomplishing what you set out to do. There are many possible approaches that you can choose when it comes to social media. One is to make a commitment to 20 minutes a day. Another is to interacting for 1 minute every hour that you are working (which may be a little more cumbersome if you aren’t used to it). Using an alarm will help you if that is the approach that you decide to take. Remember that relationships are at the heart of social media success so you need to factor that into your social media time. Once you have established relationships, you need to work on cultivating them and allowing them to grow.

Don’t be afraid to eliminate what isn’t working

If you find that one or more of  your social media efforts aren’t working, there is no shame in abandoning it (or them) and replacing the channel(s) with ones that you feel will work more effectively.

Conclusion

As time goes on and technology progresses, it is critical that you stay current with what is available and with what works for your business. What works today may not work tomorrow. You must always keep in mind that consistency and frequency are two elements that will be instrumental in your business’s success. You will be wise if you educate yourself as much as possible about the tools that are available to help you to achieve that success. It is essential that you keep an open mind and that you recognize that the potential is there for your business to be a raging success because of social media.

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