How to deal with social media as a small business owner

You have a Twitter, Facebook account for your business, how are you coping with social media management during your workweek, do you get time to do it at all?

If you have social media as part of your marketing strategy, you need to put the time in to do social media management, social media marketing can many hours every week.

If you do not have time to spend hours doing social media management – you need to prioritize your tasks so you make the absolute most of your valuable time?

Social media managers have a schedule crammed full of activities and tasks and to-dos. I found this article from Buffer interesting in defining the tasks a social media manager, has to handle on a daily basis.

Breaking down the tasks into more workable areas may spark ideas on how you can handle you social media needs.

Curating, crafting, posting, and scheduling all fit within a common task of content.

Measuring, analyzing, planning, and experimenting go hand-in-hand with growth.

Responding, listening, engaging, and helping seem to fit with community.

Personally I spend an hour in the morning doing my social media tasks, and if I have time in the evening I spend some additional time.

Content – what to do:

One of the important aspects in a social marketing plan is to define the proper content sharing strategy for your social media profiles. If you are able to share interesting and relevant content at the right time, you can easily expand your prospective reach, interact with them and improve your visibility like never before.

1. Decide very precisely why you are online. Trying to be everything to everyone is a recipe for disaster. Produce content and comment mainly in your niche or niches.
2. Reply in some way to everyone who engages you publicly. Hopefully within 24 hours but at least within the week. Promote the people who reach out to you. You will make friends for life.
3. Share liberally and give credit to the creator and curator of the content that you share. Part of sharing is following, friending and circling back. Put yourself in the mind and position of the other person. You like being shared, credited, and followed back, right? This is known as being open and supportive.
4. Create at least some kind of content in your niche and publish it every day. This will brand you as an expert in your niche. The sharing that you do will result in even more sharing of your stuff. This is called shareism.
5. Start believing in yourself. And start saying this. People believe in people who believe in themselves. This is not “arrogance” or “conceit”. This is simply being. If someone compliments you or endorses you then allow and accept it. Promote it!
6. Be 100% positive. Always. If possible be fun too. People go online to be inspired and entertained. Not depressed and bored.
7. Thank. Publicly and often. Not only will this attitude of gratitude empower you but people will engage with and share your stuff again and again because of a simple thank you. People are also drawn to those they see thanking liberally
8. Be around at least a bit every day. People will engage and share the content of those who they know will see that being done and people who they think will respond.

Does any of this look “hard” ?

There’s a lot of fresh content to be shared. The key, if you’re time-strapped, is in finding the content that’s right for you and your audience. This is where tools come in. I can not do this without using some tools that automate some of these functions for me. Here are some of my favourite tools:

Feedly

Feedly is a tool to get latest and interesting articles from various websites and blogs. If you sort out proper method to share those contents with your customer, you can crack the hardest part of content sharing strategies.

Nuzzel

Nuzzel lets you know what stories your friends are talking about and you can share the news to your social network.

Flipboard

Flipboard is Your Personal Magazine. With the world’s best sources organized into thousands of topics, it’s a single place to follow the stories and companies that you are interested in. With Flipboard you can create your own magazine based on your interest, you can find my Flipboard cycling magazine here.

IFTTT

IFTTT empowers you with creative control over the products and apps you love. You can automatically set up a recipe that thanks to a new Twitter follower.

In Feedly you select the blogs you enjoy. Nuzzle bring you the content shared by your Twitter followers and social media connections. All you need to do is to be judicious in the RSS feeds you add to Feedly and Flipboard and keep an eye on who you follow on social media.

You can grab anything and everything that catches your eye or it seems like it might be helpful for your audience to read. Add the Flipboard browser extension and add articles to your Flipboard magazine or use the Flipboard mobile app to easily add content to your Flipboard magazine. When selecting articles for your Flipboard magazine be quick to select the content that will work for you.

Next, you can open articles in Flipboard and add them to with Klout, where you can schedule all the content that you want to share with your social network, you can add content to Klout by adding the Klout to your browser and click the Klout icon to save articles. Here’s where an IFTTT recipe will come in super handy as well, the difference is that with Klout you can schedule, with IFTTT the content gets posted as it happens or you can use IFTTT to thanks new followers on your social networks.

Growth

It does not stop with posting articles you need to measure the growth of your influence. Log in to the various places where you collect stats on your social media marketing –

Twitter Analytics

Facebook Insights

Keep in mind that insights are only available after at least 30 people like your Page.tw

Community

First, take a look into the notifications section inside Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and your other social media channels. Next, get an account with Mention,

in Mention, you can see all the times your name or your brand’s name has appeared on social media, in blog posts, and across the Internet. Mention will track everything, and you can respond and reply right from your Mention dashboard.  For twitter you can use Commun.it

If you happen to have a sea of notifications or mentions, definitely spend the time addressing each one. Then, hop onto your account and start engaging.

• Check your Facebook notifications.
• Check your Twitter notifications (tip: click on “Mentions” specifically).
• Follow up with new connections on LinkedIn.
• Welcome new additions to your circles on Google+.
• Reply to all the comments on your posts.
• Like, favourite, retweet, or comment on posts from VIP lists.

Wrapping Up!

I’d love to hear your thoughts and learn a bit about the way you do things. If you’re open to sharing, please do leave your thoughts in the comments!