How To Mas­ter Your So­cial Me­dia Ac­counts In 30 Min­utes A Day

Have you ever scratched your head how busy en­tre­pre­neurs man­age to keep sev­eral so­cial me­dia pro­files alive?

How they seem to be on­line ²⁴⁄₇, post­ing up­dates, en­gag­ing with fol­low­ers, and still find time to run their business?

And, the most im­por­tant ques­tion of all:

How can you do this with your own so­cial me­dia presence?

It’s easy to get lost in so­cial me­dia. With my clients and with fel­low busi­ness own­ers I typ­i­cally see one of these scenarios:

• They feel so over­whelmed and ‘so­­cial-me­­dia-in­­­com­pe­­tent’ that they don’t even start.
• They have cre­ated sev­eral pro­files, but they post very in­fre­quently. A Face­book page may get a few posts in a row, then they for­get about it for 3 months, then they go back to post­ing … and so on. You prob­a­bly know the routine!
• They are fre­quent posters and en­gagers, but it costs so much time, that vi­tal ar­eas of their busi­ness suf­fer. They en­gage a lot, while con­ver­sions and sales are dying.You just can’t hang out 90 min­utes or more on so­cial me­dia pro­files every day. Es­pe­cially if your fol­low­ing is small and you’re see­ing dis­mal results.

Here are 5 steps how you can mas­ter your so­cial me­dia pro­files ef­fi­ciently. If you im­ple­ment these ideas, you’ll achieve more in 30 min­utes a day than you’d oth­er­wise achieve in 2 hours.

I’ve or­dered them in a step by step se­quence. Start at #1; only move ahead to the next step once you’ve mas­tered the pre­vi­ous one.

1. Know Your Goals

Be­ing clear about your so­cial me­dia goals will not only save you time, most of all it will help you get­ting much bet­ter re­sults from your ac­tiv­i­ties. Most peo­ple de­vel­oped their daily rou­tine ran­domly. They’ll lo­gin to their ac­counts, skim the news, check for in­ter­ac­tions from their fol­low­ers. As a re­sult of what they find, they’ll post some ran­dom shares and answers.

You guessed it: re­gard­ing your so­cial me­dia MARKETING this won’t get you far while cost­ing pre­cious time. Know­ing your goals not only tells you what to do, it also tells you what not to do, what not to waste time on.

2 ex­am­ples for so­cial me­dia goals:

• If your goal is get­ting traf­fic for your web site, you’d fo­cus on post­ing links, find­ing the right words to get great click through rates, find­ing the best time to post for max­i­mal response.
• If your goal is to con­nect to in­flu­encers who can help your biz, you’d spend time on read­ing their posts and in­ter­act­ing with them. Every­thing you’d do on so­cial me­dia would be VERY dif­fer­ent from what you’d do for the goal ‘traf­fic to my site.’

Would­n’t it be great if we could mesh it all to­gether? Yes. But, sorry, not work­ing. Your re­sults fol­low your fo­cus. You need to de­cide what your goals are.

2. Fol­low A Daily Routine

This post is about be­ing ef­fi­cient with so­cial me­dia. Of course there are times when you go to Face­book for fun, for con­nect­ing with friends. But dur­ing your work­ing hours I rec­om­mend not get­ting dis­tracted and fo­cus­ing on us­ing so­cial for your busi­ness goals.

How to do it? It’s easy. Es­tab­lish a daily rou­tine and stick to it religiously.

You’ll need to find out two things:

• What to do? This in­cludes which sites to visit (and in which or­der), what tools to open, and what ac­tiv­i­ties to do with sites and tools.
• How much time to spend on each ac­tiv­ity each day?

At first you’ll need a few days to fig­ure out how much time you need for the spe­cific tasks. For­tu­nately, every­thing you can do on so­cial me­dia is repet­i­tive (see daily rou­tine list be­low). Once you’ve es­tab­lished the daily rou­tine, things are easy.

3. Use Tools

Your daily rou­tine will most likely in­clude these 5 activities.

1. Share your own up­dates with your followers.
2. Re­view con­tent (blogs and other peo­ple’s so­cial streams)
3. Share other peo­ple’s con­tent with your followers.
4. In­ter­act with other peo­ple’s con­tent (com­ment­ing).
5. Re­view in­ter­ac­tions and an­swer (com­ments on your up­dates, messages).

Once you’ve mas­tered the ‘what to do’ man­u­ally, it’s time for the next step: us­ing tools to do things faster.

The first thing that comes to mind are prob­a­bly ex­ter­nal tools like Sprout­So­cial or Hoot­Suite.

These tools com­bine in­for­ma­tion from sev­eral so­cial me­dia sites into one dash­board. Us­ing these dash­boards you can re­view other peo­ple’s streams and their in­ter­ac­tions with you, and you don’t even have to visit Face­book, or Twit­ter, directly.

You can use RSS read­ers to speed read the daily posts from hun­dreds of blogs on one page. Us­ing feed read­ers from in­side tools like Sprout­So­cial even al­lows to di­rectly share blog posts to your so­cial networks.

The sec­ond group of tools are the fea­tures so­cial me­dia sites them­selves of­fer. My fa­vorite ex­am­ple are Twit­ter lists. I’m fol­low­ing more than 3000 peo­ple. As a re­sult of that my ‘home’ twit­ter stream is use­less. Too much noise, too much unim­por­tant tweets.

That’s why I use Twit­ter lists to quickly see (and in­ter­act with) Tweets from peo­ple who are im­por­tant to me. Face­book has lists as well, and Google Plus has circles.

4. Use Automation

What we’ve seen with tools so far was still man­ual work at the time of post­ing. You’ll save a lot more time au­tomat­ing things.

You can use tools to sched­ule posts to go live at spe­cific times, so you don’t have to be on­line sev­eral times a day.

Other tasks to au­to­mate might be au­to­mat­i­cally send­ing mes­sages to cer­tain peo­ple, au­to­mat­i­cally post­ing con­tent from trust­wor­thy sources to your streams, and more.

The num­ber of tools is large, and so are the tasks they can per­form for you.

5. Get Assistants

Em­ploy­ing as­sis­tants is the fi­nal step in our hi­er­ar­chy of man­ag­ing your so­cial me­dia ac­counts. It’s the last step be­cause you should have done every­thing your­self first be­fore you start man­ag­ing peo­ple for the job.

Your as­sis­tants might be some of your em­ploy­ees, if your busi­ness is large enough to have them. Or they might be free­lancers hired to con­sis­tently per­form spe­cific tasks for you.

I still like to be in con­trol of my so­cial me­dia con­tent, so I’m only out­sourc­ing ‘risk free’ tasks to other people.

When you look at my Twit­ter stream, for ex­am­ple, you’ll find fre­quent Tweets list­ing my new fol­low­ers and say­ing ‘thanks for fol­low­ing.’ This is a repet­i­tive task that I don’t need to do my­self, I’ve del­e­gated it to my assistant.

And while I’m writ­ing this post, my as­sis­tant is adding 150 new blog feeds to my Sprout­So­cial RSS reader.

How much or how lit­tle you del­e­gate to oth­ers, is en­tirely up to you.

There you have it, five steps to man­age your so­cial me­dia ac­counts with max­i­mal ef­fi­ciency. If you ever won­dered how the so­cial me­dia celebri­ties get it done - there is­n’t re­ally a se­cret. It’s as sim­ple as hav­ing a daily rou­tine and not wast­ing time get­ting sidetracked.