I don’t think I would be anywhere near as productive as I am in social media today without having systems, tools and processes to organize and monitor my expanding network. They really have been the secret to my success, and of my clients’ success. In the work that I do in social media, overwhelm and time management are always the biggest concerns that I hear–but they don’t have to be.
Automation is all about leveraging your time and energy, but often you will hear people say that this goes against the whole idea of social media being about building and nurturing relationships. However, there are ways to automate some of your social media efforts that do not detract from cultivating your authentic personality and voice when it comes to your online presence.
Identifying valuable resources, like websites, blog posts or quotes that you believe would be helpful or valuable to your Twitter followers and pre-scheduling sharing this content would be one example. The nature of tweets like these is that they are essentially one-way communication posts and do not depend on you being available when they are posted in order to field some kind of “real time” response. Therefore, this kind of content is ideal for identifying and pre-scheduling in advance. A tool like Hootsuite.com is great for setting these types of updates up.
The most common way to delegate in social media is via a virtual assistant, but it’s important to note that it is not recommended that you delegate anything that contains your voice or personality. A specific example of an ideal delegation task would be having someone track and monitor your reputation and brand via search.twitter.com or the search feature on Facebook.
When thinking about delegation, stick to administrative, housekeeping or organizational tasks not related to the conversation–for example, approving Facebook friend requests with an established criteria or using criteria to find more people to follow on Twitter. Other tasks would be to do the initial research on ideal people in Facebook to send friend requests to, pre-scheduling tweets as mentioned earlier, researching quality sites, links, and blogs that contain good content for you to share via tweets and Facebook updates, creating events in Facebook, managing your Facebook inbox, adding new business-related applications to your Fan Page and more.
One of the biggest mistakes that people make (especially those new to social media) is that they start to get stuck in a cycle of automating, broadcasting and automating–over and over. It’s very difficult to generate positive results this way. However, automating and delegating appropriate activities while still taking the time to engage in regular conversation can be the perfect blend in order to leverage your time–and still maximize your success.
Christine Gallagher, The Online Marketing and Social Media Success Coach, is founder of Communicate Value, where she is dedicated to teaching small business owners and professionals how to conquer the overwhelming aspects of online and social media marketing to increase business and maximize profits. To get your F.R.E.E. 5-Part E-Course and receive her weekly marketing & success articles on leveraging technology, building relationships and boosting your profits, visit http://communicatevalue.com.
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