15 Minute Social Media Marketing

Do you have a dedicated social media person on your staff? A few years ago, when businesses first began to hire young ‘social media’ experts to run their marketing campaigns, my first thought was to scoff. Getting paid to play on Facebook all day long? Sounds really hard (tongue firmly planted in cheek).

As it turns out, social media marketing really can be a full-time job. There may come a time in the near future when major businesses spend more on their Facebook and Twitter campaigns than on all other forms of advertising combined.

With the shift toward monetizing our online social experience has come new rules about what’s acceptable and what works for advertisers. Sidebar ads on Facebook are quickly being usurped in value by ‘Promoted’ posts. For a fee, companies can make their status updates ‘stickier’ on news feeds so that more followers get the chance to see them.

But this content still follows the same rules of a regular post. If it’s marketing drivel, followers will block it out just like a banner or sidebar ad. So how do you keep it engaging, while balancing a Twitter feed, Pinterest page, and Foursquare account? Perhaps you’re a small business and hiring a social media expert is hardly an option, let alone a marketing professional.

Fortunately, with a bit of know-how and dedication, it’s simple to design a system that can reduce your social media marketing to just 15 minutes a day while still maximizing its effectiveness.

Write Your Posts in Advance

Have you ever signed into your Facebook account (business or personal) just to post an update, but spent ten minutes scanning through your friends’ posts? That’s fine — it’s what social media is for and how we stay informed — but it can also suck hours away from our workday, leaving us with the impression that social media marketing takes too much time.

Help reduce this ‘browsing’ time by writing your posts in advance. At any hour of the day, take notes as ideas come to you on a real notepad or a note-taking app on your phone. You can even send yourself a text. Furthermore, save articles, posts or infographics that inspire posts at any time with a bookmark or a program like Pinterest or Evernote, so that your links will be handy when it’s time to reference them on your own page.

Each morning at work, sign into your account just long enough to post your updates to each platform. Sign on with a plan. If you use Twitter and Facebook, the actual posting process should take five minutes or less.

Dedicate Response Times

We often feel that comments left by social media followers should be responded to immediately (and sooner is indeed better). But if you’re in the middle of a project, constantly switching gears to handle Facebook alerts can suck productivity levels away fast.

Dedicate a time (or times) each day that you log in to respond to activity on your pages. Turn off the automatic alerts that show up in your email and on your phone, distracting you throughout your work day. It’s important to engage with your followers — the back and forth generates comments that will elevate your posts higher in news feeds and build you credibility and visibility. But responding shouldn’t occur at the expense of getting important work done, especially if you’re a small business owner juggling varied responsibilities.

By choosing one or two times each day that you log in for five minutes and respond to comments, you’ll reduce the constant checking-in that alert systems tempt us to do.

Create a Chain of Command

Depending on the size of your company, varied people may have different jobs relating to your social media account. If you have a customer service person or team, they’ll likely be the ones to respond to some comments or Tweets about their experience with your company (but they may not be the ones checking your account).

Make sure you have a clear plan in place for handling these. If whoever checks your Facebook account is not the person that responds to complaints, make sure that you have a system in place to forward them the comments with the relevant contact information of the commenter to ensure a fast process.

Automate (If you need to)

Part of what makes social media work is the real-time aspect. Even if it takes you a few hours to respond to a comment, it’s still a very human back and forth.

Programs like HootSuite offer automation and streamlining of social media accounts. By logging into one master page, it’s possible to organize and schedule posts to accounts from Google+ to LinkedIn. Although this can be very useful to a big company launching a campaign or contest, it should be utilized with caution and care by small businesses.

Although the temptation may be to plug in a week’s worth of content and let the computer do the posting, automated social media can quickly suck the ‘social’ out of the process and earn your page a reputation for advertising content instead of engaging relevancy.

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