On the OPEN Forum
Whipping the Social Media Beast in 30 Minutes a Day
Anita Campbell of Small Business Trends | June 2nd, 2008 - 03:20 PM
(19) found this useful. Do you? 
How do you take advantage of social media sites without them eating up your entire day, like the attack of the killer tomatoes?
You know what I’m talking about … those social media sites where you can network with other people, make valuable business contacts, and spread the word about your business. Everything from blogs to Facebook to Twitter to LinkedIn to ….
Social media sites can put punch into your marketing and PR at little or no cost. The price is definitely right — the price in dollar terms, that is. For some small businesses social media has become a cost effective and crucial part of the marketing mix.
Only problem is … 4 hours into it you’re flitting from site to site reading everything in your path, leaving comments and voting on your favorite articles, and making new connections along the way. With no end in sight! It’s social media marketing gone amuck.
Meanwhile your phone goes unanswered. Your email inbox is reaching crisis proportions. And work keeps piling up.
Developing a Regular Routine
The secret to avoiding the “social media time sink,” as many entrepreneurs and businesspeople are calling it, is to work social media into a daily, weekly and monthly routine.
Make social media part of your regular workflow and it becomes something you do almost automatically. You’ll be much more efficient at it because you are used to doing it. You don’t have to think about it. (Or at least, you won’t have to think about it very much.) You don’t put it off and you don’t neglect it. You just do it — like clockwork.
I happened to be talking recently with one entrepreneur about this very topic. I mentioned how I work my social media into my morning routine, 30 minutes a day.
Get a cup of coffee. Do a quick check of email just to make sure there aren’t any emergencies brewing. Then I’m off to make my “social media rounds” on various websites for a half hour.
Getting Organized is the Key
The one tool that I find invaluable to organize my activities is Netvibes, where I bookmark my list of social media sites. The sites I visit regularly include OPEN Forum; Sphinn.com; SmallBusinessBrief.com; Work.com; my own websites; Facebook; Twitter; and numerous blogs and forums.
If I had to stop and think about every site I wanted to visit, and manually type in the URLs, it would take me a lot longer. I’d certainly forget some of them. Using Netvibes to bookmark my master list, I don’t have to think about which sites to visit. Also, if I stumble upon a new social media site or discover a new blog, I simply add the URL or the RSS feed to my list.
Some sites I visit daily. Some I visit every few days or once a week – depending on how active the sites are or how much value I have gotten from them. Some like LinkedIn, I visit only when I have a specific purpose (e.g., to approve invitations to connect or to check someone out).
I’m pretty active on social media sites –- maybe an 8 on a scale of 1 to 10. Now that I have gotten organized and into a routine, I can pack a lot of activity into 30 minutes, visiting a dozen or more sites.
As soon as the half hour is up, I jump immediately to my regularly scheduled workload. That way, I make sure to get my social media activities out of the way early – if I don’t, I may never get to them. The day could be gone and I’d be too pooped to follow through.
How do I make myself stop, though — isn’t that the question? Well, I used to set an Outlook reminder to notify myself when the 30 minutes was up (otherwise it would be noon and I’d still be at it!). But now, I don’t even need a reminder. It has become such a part of my daily routine that my internal clock just “knows” when it’s time to stop and move on to other activities.
Ivana Taylor of Strategy Stew also mentioned a similar morning routine. In her case, she starts at 7:30 am and moves seamlessly through a progression: first reading the print newspaper, then heading to the Web for her digital reading of her favorite blogs and others sites. Finally she focuses on interactive outreach, i.e., connecting with others on social media sites, conversing with others on Twitter, and so on.
She organizes her list of sites to visit using iGoogle, noting that it is convenient and easy to click through directly to the sites she wants to visit.
How does she stick to a schedule and avoid having social media take over her entire day? Ivana says, “It helps if you have a meeting or event that forces you to stop at a certain time. For instance, I have a morning meeting that I attend 3 days a week, and have to stop for that.” In all, she spends 45 minutes a day most days.
Doesn’t Need to be Rigid
Now, you might wonder, what happens if you have an early breakfast meeting or some deadline keeps you from your morning routine? Well, so be it. Sometimes I miss reading my morning paper, too, just like I miss my social media rounds, because of a deadline or a business trip or an early meeting. But that’s just a temporary situation. The next day or two you can get back to your routine. If it’s become a routine, you will feel a need to get back to it.
Just having a routine is enough to keep you organized and focused.
When you do your routine doesn’t matter — do whatever works for you. Maybe you decide to do your social media routine on your lunch hour or in the evening. Whenever you do it, a routine will help you make the most of social media — without it consuming your entire workday.
Do you have a social media routine?
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Discussion Boards
Chris | June 3rd, 2008 at 6:27 am
Still working on developing an organized routine and I think I’ve finally managed to do so. It’s a good idea to physically stop yourself somehow (through an alarm or whatnot) otherwise, it can go on for days and days. But my social media participation is now manageable and I’m much happier for it!
To Harness Social Media, Get Thee Into a Routine! | Small Business Trends | June 3rd, 2008 at 11:21 am
[…] My latest article about taming the social media beast has been syndicated over at the OPEN Forum: The one tool that I find invaluable to organize my activities is Netvibes, where I bookmark my list of social media sites. The sites I visit regularly include OPEN Forum; Sphinn.com; SmallBusinessBrief.com; Work.com; my own websites; Facebook; Twitter; and numerous blogs and forums. […]
Amanda | June 3rd, 2008 at 1:31 pm
Organization and discipline is definitely key. I start my morning with checking email and my personal favorite sites. Then I start one by one and do my social media. I have a tendency to get too involved. What helps control me is at 11am I take an hour break by watching “The View” while on the treadmill. Then after lunch, I start directly on my other things that need done.
Martin Lindeskog | June 3rd, 2008 at 2:03 pm
I am scanning through different sites in the morning , using Netvibes. Then I am checking it again in the evening before dinner and one last before I go to bed.
Rob | June 3rd, 2008 at 9:49 pm
Great article! It’s become like reading the newspaper to me. I wake up and scan Digg and Google News before work and when I have leisure time, mostly on weekends and lunch time, I spend time on facebook keeping in touch with friends and playing games on titanstrike.
Norbert Mayer-Wittmann | June 4th, 2008 at 3:03 am
Good article!
I’ve never used netvibes — and I probably wouldn’t, either, because I find that having to log in to another website just to see my bookmarks is a waste of time.
I keep my bookmarks at http://7×7.info (and some of these are actually works in progress). I update them every now and then, but they’re just I click away from my homepage (and they’re always *instantly* available *wherever* I go by just typing in 1 short URL). What’s more, I’ve coded them with the “accesskey” function (so I don’t even need to fiddle with a mouse) and they open new browser windows (so I don’t need to go “back” — and this also makes it easier to compare the “content” among a group of websites).
I also find it interesting that you didn’t mention Google *at all* — this is a trend I noted several months ago: the success of social media is primarily a sign that Google is no longer a useful tool for discovering high-quality information in a timely manner.
Also: some of the sites you mention (notably twitter.com and work.com) fall into the category of “keyword” domain names — such sites usually have very high standards for quality (unlike, for instance, “made up” names like “facebook” or “netvibes”). Besides that, they are also very “successful” simply because they are so focused on the information needs of their users (and this fact is an *added* reason why they would not normally squander the value of their domain names as indicators of reliable information [in other words: they *have* a name to lose]).
A recent article in the New York Times article also reported about a new algorithm that Google has developed to measure the efficacy of the results and — as I wrote in http://gaggle.info/post/60/is-google-a-basket-case — I think it would be *fascinating* to compare websites with such a comparison algorithm as Google now apparently applies to their own search engines.
You colleague mentions that she spends about 45 minutes using iGoogle (compared to your 30 minutes using netvibes). I find that if you concentrate more on valuable sites with up-to-date information (rather than paying too much attention to outdated links used to rank information in popular “one-size fits-all” search engines), you will be able to reduce your information gathering significantly — perhaps to 5 or 10 minutes daily).
Note that there are *RARE* exception when a term actually enters the standard lexicon from a website that functions as a useful tool for a wide part of the population. Google was often touted as an example of this (but actually people used the term to mean “to use Google” — so there was actually no “meaning” to the term itself). A better example is digg.com — and this is, granted, a youth oriented site (an in the jargon of youngsters “digging” something means to find it “cool” — and I have even found my contacts using the string “digg” in this sense [though it’s, I guess, a misspelling of “dig”]). This “edge of natural language” is an intriguing space — but it will always be a “safer bet” to *stick* with sites like work.com, hotels.com, cars.com, etc. (depending on the type of information you’re looking for).
Wealthstratosphere » Easier Way To Use Social Media Sites For Promotion | June 4th, 2008 at 4:06 pm
[…] http://blogs.openforum.com/2008/06/02/whipping-the-social-media-beast-in-30-minutes-a-day/ […]
Larry Benet | June 9th, 2008 at 10:49 am
Great little article. I just had this conversation with my friend Warren Whitlock this weekend.
I said it is tough enough to respond back to all the e mails I get
and keep up with all the work a normal day brings.
As there seems to be a new social media site going up every hour
I think it also smart to identify where your clients and centers of influence are, which will help you identify the best places to invest your time.
If your clients are on Linked in and Facebook, well it probably is a good return on your investment to spend time there.
I would also ask the question what are you doing to enter the conversation, and add value, and last but not least are you making meaningful connections?
Larry Benet
The Connector
http://www.larrybenet.com
Duke Glasgow | June 15th, 2008 at 4:46 am
Hey Anita! Wonderful article. I love to leave comments and make business contacts on these forums as well. For me it has worked well so far. I also see the advertising and promotion companies gain a lot from this in the near future.
………………………..
Duke Glasgow
Social Media Marketing
http://www.widecircles.com
http://www.widecircles.com