Making time for social media

I’ve had quite a few conversations lately, that revolve around the issue of time : everyone is busy and doesn’t have the time for social media. Many businesses now recognise the benefits of social media, but it is an area that gets neglected as other areas get prioritised. Many people I’ve spoken to say that they don’t have an hour or to block off in the day to update Twitter, Facebook, write a blog post etc..

The best advice I can give is to integrate managing your social media presence into your working day. Using tools such as Tweetdeck allow you to update and monitor on the go, not only saving time, but allowing you to be reactive. It’s no use saying you’ll block off an hour in the evening, when social media requires that you are always listening, all the time.

When you learn to manage your social media presence in this way, you’ll find it really doesn’t take up too much of your time and can be easily managed as part of your working day. The more time you spend in social media, the more it will turn into something manageable. You will soon learn how to filter out a certain amount of the ‘noise’ and focus on the areas that are working for you and your business. Running a blog might seem like a mammoth job at the start, but the more posts you write, the more you’ll get used to the writing style. Writing shorter posts is beneficial as people have relatively short attention spans online! Break it down into manageable chunks for you as the author and for your readers only.

To help you out, we’ve put together our favourite time-saving tools.  :

Tweetdeck

- update as you go, run searches for certain keywords and reply to tweets as they come in

Google Alerts

-receive updates straight into your inbox for mentions of your brand terms online (can monitor competitors and general industry terms here also)

Google Reader

- you don’t need to visit sites separately, simply subscribe to rss feeds here and receive content in easily digestable chunks

Tubemogul

- if you’re uploading video content, you don’t need to update accounts separately – tubemogul does it all for you automatically

Socialmention

- ‘Like Google Alerts but for social media’

PostLater

- A great tool if you’re going to be offline for a while – write blog posts beforehand and schedule when   they’re posted