Social media time suckers: How to avoid them

There was a time when the telephone was the big time waster. Friends, children, parents, clients would call and interrupt you 50 times a day and you could never get any work done due to having to talk on the telephone. Now, the great time sucker is social media. Your mobile device is buzzing or beeping with activity 24/7 and there is no escape from the constant updates, invites to play games, or join this cause or that cause. It never ends.

Create a plan — Plan out how you will use social media to the letter. Plan each day, each update, and what you’ll do with your time. No one can find the treasure at the end of the rainbow without a map, and nothing is magic about Internet Marketing. Plan for success, and you will experience success. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Social Media Marketing

Social Media Strategies – Goals, Tactics and Metrics

Setting achievable goals for your social media marketing efforts is essential to making sure that you’re not wasting time, money and resources hitting your head up against a brick wall. It’s essential to test and measure each marketing strategy, including social media. If you lose sight of the point of social media in terms of using it to promote your business efforts, you can also lose track of the amount of time you’re spending using it. And let’s be honest, sometimes the time you’re spending is just messing around.

In order to set goals you need to be able to write down what your goal is. A goal is something like — “Increase sales by 5% in 60 days.” Now you’re going to have to develop and discover ways to verify that you’ve achieved any goal you make. That is where testing, and evaluating metrics comes in. First you create the goal, then you decide how to achieve the goal (tactics), then you test and evaluate (metrics).

The steps look like this: [Read more...]

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Maximizing your ROI with social media

When spending time on any type of marketing in business make sure that you’re maximizing your return on investment (ROI). This means that the money or time (because frankly — time is money) that you spend on your social media should be giving you a payoff of some sort. The pay off may be monetary or some other form such as making important and useful contacts. The important thing about ROI is that you must determine in advance what you expect social media to do for you.

The problem is that most people who use social media don’t track ROI at all. They might track dollars spent, but they do not factor in their time spent at all. Even though they spend an exorbitant amount of time on social media there is no accounting for it. The sad fact is if the time spent isn’t planned out, and mapped out with specific goals in mind, much of that time is not productive. [Read more...]

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Facebook Page Automation Tips and Tools

One problem with social media is that it can be a real time sucker. How many times have you told yourself you’re just going to get on Facebook for a couple of minutes to post some information for your friends only to have five hours pass you by as if it is only five minutes? One answer to this problem is to automate many of the tasks associated with having a Facebook Page such as:

  • Posting links to new posts
  • Getting new “likes”
  • Sharing awesome information
  • Adding links
  • Simple Facebook Connect [Read more...]
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Why you need a social media editorial calendar

One of the best ways to stop wasting time with social media is to create an editorial calendar. Maybe you thought editorial calendars were only for large newspapers, magazines, and well, the big guy on the block but the truth is, having an editorial calendar will save you time and help you create a real plan to success using social media. With a calendar you will eliminate time sucking activities that have no return on investment (ROI) and create a situation where everything you do has a purpose. Acting with purpose is the best way to grow a successful Internet marketing business.

The good thing is that creating a social media editorial calendar is simple. You can use either excel or word to create it but it might look something like this (link to January 2011.pdf). First you have to have a publication calendar to flesh out the topics that you want to blog about and write about that have to do with your niche for each month of the year. You can go even deeper and come up with about 20 titles to blog about for the month along with about 10 articles to write for article marketing based on your main feature and keywords. You’ll have more keywords than the example because you will have a list of about 100 keywords from doing keyword research. Try to create blogs and articles based on these keywords for each month.

[Read more...]

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Use one site to update all your social media

ping.fm
yoono

Gizapage is another promising aggregator. It says it’s an integrated social hub bringing together your Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr and more so that you can share with all networks at the same time, and you can pick and choose which networks too. It also lets you view your full profile from one spot. The problem with it is that you have to ask for a quote. It looks really great but that automatically makes me think it will be expensive. I put in for a quote but haven’t heard anything yet.

Social aggregators aren’t new, they’ve been around as long as social media has been around. If you do a Google search on social media aggregators you’re likely to find a lot of them both working and defunct. You’ll find free aggregators, and premium fee based services. They come and go so choose a popular one that is widely used so that you don’t have to start over. Part of using an aggregator is to save time. Setting one up takes some time and work but is worth it in the end so no matter which one you choose definitely make sure you do choose one in order to stop wasting time duplicating tasks.

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Social media success is about giving of yourself

You can use social media strategically, automate a lot of it, and get rid of the time wasters but what you can’t or should not do is give up the conversation. The trick is framing your conversation within your niche. Believe it or not, answering questions, and giving away information free on social media networks like LinkedIn on there “answers” area can go a long way toward creating good will, which can lead to clients who want you enough to pay the rates you’re asking, or site visitors who are already primed to buy what you recommend. By giving of yourself it happens almost magically.

Automation is great for ending time wasting tasks of posting new blog posts, new articles, and outside information. It frees up your time so that you can have a real conversation with potential clients in all of your social networks whether it is Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or a forum you enjoy. Spending time having real conversations and answering questions will establish you as an expert, bring traffic to your blog, and provide you with valuable information and connection to your target market.

[Read more...]

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Social Media Strategies — 5 Time saving tactics

Saving time on social media is imperative if you want to escape time wasters and time suckers. By setting up a system you can avoid many of the distracting games, gossip, and out and out worthless parts of social media. There is a time to play games, but it’s not while you’re at work. Even though you don’t have a boss looking over your head, the time wasting will catch up with you if you don’t get a handle on it.

Plan for Success — If you have no road map to your destination you’re not likely to make it. Sure, sometimes people accidentally hit the lottery, but most of the time success comes from careful and thoughtful planning. Don’t set out blindly for a hit or miss effort. Instead, make a plan and stick to it, adjusting as necessary.

Implement Automation — Social media automation is a great way to save time. There is no good reason why you should not schedule automatically new posts, new articles and new information across all your social media. There are many tools available that do a great job. This will enable you to use your social media time more wisely in conversation with your potential clients rather than just pushing information to them.

Schedule your time  — If you set up automation you can then carefully schedule your time for using social media for being, social. Imagine that! The automation of updating friends and followers of blog posts will create time for you to actually read other people’s tweets, re-tweet good information, and to actually participate. The trick is to schedule the time, and stick to the schedule.

Outsource — Yes, you can outsource a lot of aspects of social media. A virtual assistant can set up all your automation. She can also keep track of your metrics, and alert you to important tweets or buzz that you need to address in a blog post or in a direct message to someone. A good long term virtual assistant can even answer your direct messages for you when needed.

Turn it off — You read that right. When you’re off work, turn off your business social media. When you are doing other work, turn off your social media completely. There is no reason to have it on 24/7 because that will only serve to distract you from money making tasks. There are better ways to monitor social media with automation and RSS feeds.

With proper planning, implementation and perseverance your social media efforts can and will pay off to bring you more traffic, more business, and more success than you ever thought possible. The important thing to learn is to control your time since that is your most important asset. If you can do something else that earns you more money, do that instead, while using tools that let you continue with using social media strategically.

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How to use social media to monitor buzz

Monitoring Social Media Buzz in Social Media MarketingMonitoring your buzz via social media can be a real time sucker. RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication” and it’s a great tool to use for automatically managing your social media and finding out what people are saying about you. There are a lot of ways you can use RSS to your benefit when it comes to social media and creating automation to avoid time wasters.

Here are the step by step instructions to setting up your RSS reader to monitor your social media buzz.

Set up Google Reader Account

Set up Google Alerts

By setting up RSS feeds to monitor the social buzz about you, your niche and business you can then check it all on one page in one glance a couple of times a day. Better you can have your virtual assistant to set it up, and check it once a day and send you a report if something exciting happens, or is  otherwise important that needs to be dealt with.

Twitter Search

Filed Under: Social Media Marketing