What is your Social Media strategy?
Social Media is like anything else in life: you get out of it what you put in to it. The reasons to join Facebook, Twitter, start a blog, or even share photos, are many and varied, and tasks related to these networks can lead to a considerable time investment.
An interesting meme recently floated around the blogosphere: How do you use social media?
Considering that the people asking those questions were themselves bloggers, marketers, and social media veterans whose job is to spend most of the day connected to their computers, the answers included daily hours dedicated to Twitter, blogging, and even Facebook.
For most people, there is no hard and fast rule concerning the amount of time to spend on any social network, and your social media demands might not be so pressing. So, the time you spend is usually dictated by the tasks you wish to accomplish.
Are you just keeping up with friends? A few minutes on Facebook at the beginning and end of the day should suffice. If you are techy enough, you could feed that need by sending updates to your cell phone.
Twitter is excellent for quick updates, but doesn’t quite have the mainstream reach of Facebook yet. If you have a decent Twitter network though, you can easily view a stream of your friends’ updates. Twitter Direct Messaging allows you to answer them in a style reminiscent of instant messaging. Twitter also adapts well to the cell phone.
Facebookers who share photos across their networks require more than just a few minutes a day. Their first goal might be to learn a third-party software to load and tag photos quickly. These apps have a bit of a learning curve, but are well worth the time. Chris Brogan gives a good primer on managing Facebook list functions, while this post gives insight on Twitter applications worth checking out.
There are other ways to share across the Internet. For photos, Flickr, Piassa (both free services), and Apple’s Mobile Me (paid service), offer integrated methods for quickly sharing photos among friends and family. You Tube has become the ubiquitous video sharing network, and also offers quick and easy methods for uploading.
Using these services greatly reduces the amount of time needed to spend on Facebook, or Twitter, and can help maximize your web surfing hours.
Postlouge:
Check out the following links to see how the full-time bloggers and social media experts manage their networks and streams.
- Amber Naslund points out in her post that she engages in social media full time as part of her job. She lists in order of importance her goals for each social media activity.
- In this post, Ben Yoskovitch offers a 10-minute daily guide to building a social media presence. He goes beyond Twitter and Facebook, and includes info about StumbleUpon, and MyBlogLog.
- Anyone looking beyond personal uses for social media should read this post by Mark Hayward. He details a ten-minute daily guide for using social media to promote small business.
As for me? I’ve actually separated my personal and professional networks. Facebook is now home to the rants and raves of my friends and coworkers from my “day” job, friends from past jobs, and childhood and early adult buddies. My Twitter feed now is limited to those from my professional and social media networks. This system may not work for you, but it works for me. I’ll re-evaluate in six months to determine if change is necessary.
