Recognizable? You want to post something quickly on Facebook and before you know it you are an hour further? That is fine if you are working privately, but if you use social media for business, it will quickly cost you too much time. How can you optimally use your working time for social media?
The social media pitfall
As social animals, we immediately fall for social media. The messages are often fun, relevant and interesting. You stay up to date with your (distant) friends and family. And if you place something yourself, you get "instant gratification" through likes, favorites, interests and pluses. That appears to be addictive, according to recent German research.
Maintaining a Facebook page is best done from a personal profile. So you will soon be in your private timeline. With all its consequences. But even when you look at your business timeline, you quickly click on that interesting article with 10 social media tips.
How do you keep social media business?
By working in a task-oriented and planned manner. By keeping sharp: what do you want to achieve with it? What tasks do you set against that? And you can do that without losing the social: it is a matter of prioritizing. Follow the following step-by-step plan per social media channel:
Roadmap
- Determine yourself social media goals: brand awareness, bonding, informing, answering questions, just being present, learning, exerting influence, sharing news, monitoring, making contacts ...
- Then name which activities exactly belong there. Don't forget to mention standard tasks, such as responding to @replies or messages, specifically.
- Prioritize these tasks then and determine how much time you want to spend on social media per day or week. Also consider how quickly you want to respond: do you want to respond within 24 hours? Or within 4 hours if you have a larger company?
- Plan fixed times in your agenda, for example from 9 a.m. to 9:30 a.m. and from 4:30 p.m. to 5 p.m. This is extremely difficult if you are a freelancer ... but therefore all the more important if you really want to use social media.
- Is it time for social media: only complete your task list. It sounds very simple, but that way you start with what you find most important.
- Evaluate, for example monthly. Take your time regularly to go through your social media task list: is the most important thing really at the top? How important is it for you to do a search on your company name every 4 hours? Does an automatic e-mail not work better? Is a newsletter not better to stay informed?
So for example brand awareness on Facebook:
- Regularly placing branded content.
- Creating branded content: clearly linked to your company, high-profile and shareable.
- Measure the effects of time, content and message.
For monitoring on Twitter:
- Search actions (or automatic e-mail message, or standard search column in Hootsuite) by #DTV company name, #DTV product / service, #demand company name, #demand product / service.
- Search on your company name, including mistypes.
- Search for your (social media) promotions or campaigns, think of a consumer who responds to your radio commercial or advertisement on Twitter.
A nice exercise is to finish your social media without your social media task list, and to keep a good record of what you are doing. What do you click on? What are you reading? What are you all doing? If you then ask yourself: how can that be done more efficiently, read the step-by-step plan above again.
Image Shape of Time by Jeff mcNeill
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