Managing Your Social Media In Just 30 Minutes
There are several tools to help you manage your social media. We are all so busy that sometimes managing your social media can be overwhelming and I would share with you two tools that will help you make this task a little easier. Two of my favorite tools for social media content management are Nutshell Mail and HootSuite. To be quite honest the reason those are two of my favorites is because they have FREE versions and they help make managing my social media much easier. In this article I am going to give you an overview of these tools and how you can use them to manage your social media in 30 minutes a day or 30 minutes a week.
Nutshell Mail is a free service provided by Constant Contact that takes a copy of all your latest social media updates and compresses them into one email. You are able to manage your accounts for Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Yelp, FourSquare and CitySearch into Nutshell Mail and schedule when you will receive your email update. Once you receive this email you can then see what has happened since you have received your last email and respond to questions and comments in a timely manner. This is a great way to make sure you are not missing an opportunity to engage with your customers.
Now that you have responded to questions or concerns you can head on over to HootSuite. If it is important to you to keep your social media updated, HootSuite allows you to be able to schedule out your posts and tweets. Twitter, Facebook, Word Press, FourSquare, My Space, Ping.fm and mixi are all compatible with HootSuite.
The first step is to decide how much time you would like to dedicate to your social media. I recommend dedicating 30 minutes a day and schedule it on your calendar until it becomes a habit. My Nutshell Mail arrives in my inbox at 1 pm everyday. The first thing I do is review my email and respond to any posts or questions, this usually takes me 15 minutes or less and then I spend the remaining 15 minutes logged into one of the social media sites. Here is an example: On Monday schedule your HootSuite posts, on Tuesday 15 minutes for Facebook, Wednesday LinkedIn, Thursday Twitter and Friday YouTube. If you don’t have 30 minutes to invest into social media each day try once a week. Schedule your Nutshell Mail to be delivered once a week and respond to posts and update your sites. If you are only able to devote once a week to social media, make it count and be consistent by trying to do it on the same day each week.