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.

Automate — Updating your social network about new posts, articles and information can be automated without any ill effects. This one act will save you hours each day. (assuming you’re blogging and creating content like you should) Smart automation is imperative to being able to get everything done that needs to be done.

Schedule — Many of us, who work from home, really hate schedules. We don’t want to feel like we have a job so we really fight against this whole schedule idea but the fact is, if you have a schedule for your social media, as well as the way you’re going to run the rest of your business, you’ll do better and you’ll be more successful. The great thing about working from home is that, when needed, you can adjust the schedule, but having the schedule and you stick to it for the most part, you’ll do well.

Participate — Automation is great but there are some things you should not outsource and that is your participation in the social media conversations within your niche. Spend a little time each work day participating in social media and it will pay off. Participating means having back and forth conversations with others. Answer questions on LinkedIn, via Twitter, and Facebook and in forums freely giving information without automatically going for the sale. You’ll be surprised to start receiving emails begging you to work with them.

Separate Business from Personal — Your Facebook Pages, Your Twitter, and your personal life should be separate. It’s okay to play games on Facebook on your off time on your personal account, but if you find yourself playing farm town for four hours during a time you were supposed to be developing a product, you’re letting it suck your time. Turn it off.

Social media, if used correctly is an invaluable source of business, but it can be a time waster if you don’t know how to avoid the issues that suck the time right out of your day. At first, you’ll feel strange and unnatural learning to avoid time suckers, but it will also be an empowering experience that will help you grow your business using social media well. After all, you must use social media, this is where your clients are, so you gotta be there!

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:

• Determine Goals
• Determine Tactics
• Perform Tactics
• Study Metrics
• Repeat

The important thing to remember is that you can’t achieve what you don’t name and plan. In other words, if you have no idea where you’re headed how can you create a map to get to your destination?  If you’re not quantifying your efforts, it’s impossible to ever know if you’re achieving anything. One of the main reasons of business failure has to do with not having a plan, not following the plan, and not tracking metrics to ensure that the plan is working and the goals are achievable.

Determine Goals — Achievable goals are small, short term goals. To create a small, short term goal you create a long term goal and break it down to manageable chunks. For instance, if you want to increase traffic to your blog by 100% in one year, you’d need to figure out what your traffic is today, and what your traffic growth needs to be each month to achieve a 100 percent growth in one year.

Determine Tactics — Now that you have your goal, you’ll need to figure out what actions you’ll take to achieve your goal. Actions may involve using social media more strategically such as creating a social media calendar and then sticking to your plan. Your social media calendar might look like this:

(10 am, 4 pm and 9 pm) Monday through Friday –  Auto sharing of new blog posts each day (posts which were either written by a ghostwriter, or yourself from a publication calendar)

(8 am, 1 pm, and 6 pm)Monday – Wednesday -Friday — Re-Tweet useful information to my followers

(11am, 3pm, and 11pm )Tuesday & Thursday — Introduce or hint about new products (you can do this via blogging as well if you have everything set up to be automatic)

8am each day spend 10 minutes answering direct messages personally

Post 2 articles a week to article marketing sites, share said articles with social media

Once you write it down, really do it, or delegate it, but get it done. You can’t succeed in any plan without carrying out the steps no matter how hard you wish it or think about it success takes action.

Study Metrics  — Before you start any new campaign check your current metrics using whatever system you like such as Google Analytics.  Then, pick a specific time each week or month to look at your data again. You can keep track in a spreadsheet to put it all together in one spot. Track subscriber rates, new comments, visitors, and even by how many people re-tweet and or share your information. Hint: Use Google Docs and hire a VA to keep track of this for you.

If you find the tactics you used worked well and you’re satisfied with the results, repeat them. If you want to ramp something up, or change a tactic, change only one tactic or even part of a tactic at a time, that way you can really measure and test how your one change affects your future results.

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.

Since marketers are not studying the impact of their use of social media, they’re not aware that they might simply be wasting time. Time suckers exist in every business, but social media, like long phone calls, can be the biggest time suckers in your business if you allow it to be. If you need encouragement not to waste your time, then study the ROI of any time you spend on any activity in your business.

There are ways to maximize your ROI when using social media. One way is to maximize your time spent on social media by the strategic  use of automation tools. You have to be aware that some types of automation can be detractors while some can add a lot of value. Which ones add or subtract are truly subjective issues that you have to study within your own organization.

Various types of automation for social media enable you to create content once and distribute throughout all your channels. There is also automation to schedule posts on blogs, even plugins that enable a publisher to publish and schedule many posts with a push of a button. Other types of automation actually respond to new people, such as auto tweets to new followers, and auto following on Twitter as well as constant re-tweets and re-sending of the same messages at different times throughout the day.

The important thing to remember is to value your time first and foremost. Then, make sure you are creating value for the other users of social media as you choose which forms of automation you use. Automation will keep you from wasting time. There is absolutely no reason to spend time posting the same link to the same new blog post or article over and over again across all your social media channels. But, there may very well be a reason to thank people “in person” for following you, or “liking” your page, or commenting on your blog posts. After all, social media is social at the heart, and you can’t be social if you’re not participating and being social.

• Posting links to new posts
• Getting new “likes”
• Sharing awesome information
• Adding links
• Simple Facebook Connect

These plugins can help automate some of the process of using Facebook. They will update your friends and likes about your new blog posts, your new content, and allow your clients and potential clients to share and like to their hearts content your content right on your website which will further share your information with people on Facebook.

After you choose a plugin to help with automation your next step is to create schedules and rules about when and how you use Facebook. For instance, give yourself a rule that you must create a certain amount of billed work before you allow yourself to socialize on Facebook. Then set a timer and stop when the timer goes off. Once you get used to the new plan you’ll become better at dealing with it.

Another way to deal with Facebook is to turn it off when you’re not actually using it. Turn off your notifications on your mobile, close the webpage when you’re working, and stop looking at it every ten minutes. By creating a plan and standard operating procedure surrounding your social media you will go far in not only eliminating time wasting, but you’ll actually save time.

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.

After you’ve created your content calendar, next you want to create a plan for your social media. Obviously you should automate sharing your blog posts and articles with an application that will update all your social media channels as soon as your scheduled blog posts are live on your blog. If you post regularly at the same time each day you’ll find that your readers will come to expect your blog posts and will email you if you miss a day!

Now, all you really need to schedule is the time you will spend on discussing your blog posts, or answering questions across all your social media networks. You can use a color code on a monthly calendar or a weekly calendar broken down into times during the day. Monday you could spend 1 hour in the morning while you drink your coffee answering questions on LinkedIn. Monday afternoon you could spend time answering and responding to blog post comments on all your blogs, and so on. Schedule the time in to do each task that needs to be done.

The great thing about working at home is that you can change your schedule if you need to, but if you find yourself changing your schedule every single day you might want to reconsider if you have a hobby or a business. If you want a real business as an Internet marketer working from home you will have to spend time working instead of waiting time. Time wasters include playing games or chit chatting about things outside your niche when you have scheduled to do something more productive.

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.

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.

If you want to make social media truly useful so that it provides a return on investment (ROI) then you have to join in the conversation. If everyone automates everything and only applications and Virtual Assistants are participating in the media then it loses the social aspects and eventually the value will plummet. No one who can make decisions or offer value will be watching if it’s all automated.

The best person to communicate your vision to the world is you. The myth of the four hour work week is that you don’t have to participate at all. It’s true you probably can outsource your entire life, but where is the joy in that? You might save time, but ultimately you lose connection to the people you wanted to connect with in the first place when you started your business. Certainly you had a goal that involved connecting with someone or helping someone. Never forget why you started your business in the first place.

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.

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.

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