Social Media Examiner » lead generation

4 Ways to Measure Social Media and Its Impact on Your Brand

Nichole Kelly — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 12:00:43 +0000

Do you know how social media is helping your business? Want to find out how Twitter, Facebook and other sites are impacting your brand awareness?

The good news is social media has finally made it to the grand stage of “accountability.” A place where there are lots of people who want to measure it. The bad news is there isn’t a single clear-cut answer.

However, with a few simple steps, you can build a measurement strategy that accomplishes your goals.

Defining Terms

To start, let’s agree that brand awareness is a measure of how recognizable your brand is to your target audience. For those looking to get ahead of the curve on social media measurement, the first step is to align your social media metrics with metrics your company is already comfortable with.

Also, let’s agree that the measurements for social media aren’t all that different from how you’ve been measuring traditional media. To put brand awareness measurement into the context of the sales funnel, the key areas to evaluate fall into three categories: social media exposure, influence and engagement.

With that understanding, let’s look at how you can level the playing field between your traditional media metrics and your social media metrics.

#1: Measuring Social Media Exposure

How many people could you have reached with your message?

In social media, this measurement is about as reliable as a print magazine’s circulation, but knowing your potential audience does have value because it represents your potential sales lead pool.

Unfortunately, as of the writing of this post, some of these metrics have to be accounted for manually, so you’ll have to balance the level of effort to track the metrics versus the value you’ll receive from them to determine their importance to your overall strategy.

A good example of where there can be unreliability in social measurement is when isolating unique users for each of your metrics. You want to avoid counting the same person twice in the list below, but realistically it’s difficult to do.

These measurements highlight the number of people you’ve attracted to your brand through social media. To mitigate the potential for duplication of users, track growth rate as a percentage of the aggregate totals. This is where you will find the real diamonds.

Twitter: Look at your number of followers and the number of followers for those who retweeted your message to determine the monthly potential reach. You should track these separately and then compare the month-over-month growth rate of each of these metrics so you can determine where you’re seeing the most growth. A great free tool to use for Twitter measurement is TweetReach.
Facebook: Track the total number of fans for your brand page. In addition, review the number of friends from those who became fans during a specified period of time or during a promotion and those who commented on or liked your posts to identify the potential monthly Facebook reach. Facebook Insights provides value here.
YouTube: Measure the number of views for videos tied to a promotion or specific period of time, such as monthly, and the total number of subscribers.
Blog: Measure the number of visitors who viewed the posts tied to the promotion or a specific period of time.
Email: Take a look at how many people are on the distribution list and how many actually received the email.

Exposure is the top of the brand awareness funnel and represents your potential sales lead pool.

#2: Measuring Engagement

How many people actually did something with your message?

This is one of the most important measurements because it shows how many people actually cared enough about what you had to say to result in some kind of action.

Fortunately engagement is fairly easy to measure with simple tools such as Radian 6, Biz360 and TweetEffect. These metrics highlight who you want to target to retain on social media channels.

For a starting list of key performance indicators for engagement, this post by Chris Lake is a great start.

Twitter: Quantify the number of times your links were clicked, your message was retweeted, and your hashtag was used and then look at how many people were responsible for the activity. You can also track @replies and direct messages if you can link them to campaign activity.
Facebook: Determine the number of times your links were clicked and your messages were liked or commented on. Then break this down by how many people created this activity. You can also track wall posts and private messages if you can link them to activity that is directly tied to a specific social media campaign.
YouTube: Assess the number of comments on your video, the number of times it was rated, the number of times it was shared and the number of new subscribers.
Blog: Evaluate the number of comments, the number of subscribers generated and finally the number of times the posts were shared and “where” they were shared (i.e., Facebook, Twitter, email, etc.). Measure how many third-party blogs you commented on and the resulting referral traffic to your site.
Email: Calculate how many people opened, clicked and shared your email. Include where the items were shared, similar to the point above. Also, keep track of the number of new subscriptions generated.

#3: Measuring Influence

This category gets into a bit of a soft space for measurement. Influence is a subjective metric that relies on your company’s perspective for definition. Basically, you want to look at whether the engagement metrics listed above are positive, neutral or negative in sentiment. In other words, did your campaign influence positive vibes toward the brand or did it create bad mojo?

You can also use automated tools like Twitalyzer, Social Mention, Radian 6 or ScoutLabs to make it a little easier, but ALWAYS do a manual check to validate any sentiment results. Influence is generally displayed as a percentage of positive, neutral and negative sentiment, which is then applied in relation to the engagement metrics and to the metrics for reach where applicable.

A great application for influence is to look at the influence by those who engaged with your brand in the above categories. Do you have a nice mix of big players with large audiences engaging with your brand, as well as the average Joe with a modest following?

If not, your influence pendulum may be about to tip over, because it’s important that you spend time engaging with both influential users and your average user. Note: many of the automated tools that track sentiment and influence are not free. And many times, you will need a combination of tools to measure all of the different social media channels.

#4: The Lead Generation Funnel

After you’ve measured through the influence portion of the funnel, you’re now creeping into where too many companies are starting their measurement efforts: the lead generation funnel. This is where the brand awareness portion of the funnel ends and the traditional ROI-driven action begins.

Exposure, influence and engagement represent brand awareness in the measurement funnel.

Understanding your reach, engagement and influence through these primary social channels will allow you to define your presence and impact, which can then be applied as a model to other social networks.

Now that you’ve tracked all of this information, how do you make it meaningful? Excel is a great tool to help organize your data. Build yourself a standard dashboard in Excel that highlights the key metrics that matter to the organization. Create a tab for a high-level overview of multiple campaigns, and a tab for each campaign for the time period you’re reporting on. Ultimately, you should put the information into the same format that you’ve used to report on traditional brand awareness campaigns, with social media as just another vehicle in the overall marketing mix.

If you’re looking for tools to use for tracking, this post by Mani Karthik at Daily Bloggr gives a nice view of options.

To really understand the importance of measurement, here’s a great post on social media measurement from Social Media Examiner: Is Social Media Marketing Measurable? The Big Debate.

What about you? Are you measuring? How are you measuring? What metrics would you add? Leave a comment below and let’s talk.

Study Shows Time Pays With Social Media Marketing

Amy Porterfield — Fri, 21 May 2010 12:00:49 +0000

Have you asked this question: Is the time I invest with social media really worth it? Whether you’re new or an old hat with social media, chances are you’ve wondered if the time commitment is really worth the return on investment (ROI).

Make no mistake about it: a true investment of time and resources is necessary to see significant social media marketing success.

But the real question is, “Just HOW MUCH time is needed to see solid success?”

This question was recently answered in the new study, 2010 Social Media Marketing Industry Report, authored by Michael Stelzner. Based on the report findings, ROI is top of mind for most marketers using social media.

Time Versus Return for Social Media Marketing

When looking at ROI, you also have to look closely at just how much time you’re investing. Unlike some other traditional forms of marketing, when it comes to social media, your investment is more time than money.

The industry report results shed some light on the amount of time marketers are really spending on social media marketing.

Out of the 1900 marketers’ responses, almost all were using social media for marketing purposes and the majority of these marketers were fairly new in the social media area.

91% of respondents indicated they were employing social media for marketing purposes.
65% of marketers have either just started or have been using social media for only a few months.

When drilling down to the actual hours spent using social media tools, the largest group was in the 1 to 5 hours per week range. Of that group, 43% are spending 4 to 5 hours each week on social media activities. A significant 56% of marketers are using social media for 6 hours or more each week and 30% for 11 or more hours weekly. It’s interesting to note that 12.5% of marketers spend more than 20 hours each week on social media.

This chart shows the overall breakdown of marketers’ time spent using social sites.

But even more interesting than the time spent on social media marketing, the report also showed a correlation between the amount of user experience and the time spent using social media tools. The median weekly time commitment for beginners was 1 hour versus 10 hours for those doing this for a few months or longer. Because 65% of respondents indicated they were newbies or just a few months in, much of their time spent on social sites could be more trial and error than solid strategy. Perhaps the difference in time spent using social tools is because the marketers who have the most experience also have more well-defined social media strategies, allowing them a clear plan of action on the social sites.

Just like with anything else, experience is golden. The more user experience one has with social media marketing, the more valuable every minute spent on social media sites becomes. The time spent on social sites is not as important as the actual results. What we really should be looking at is what kind of results are you getting for that 1 hour, 4 hours, even 12 hours per week?

Top Benefits of Social Media

When the respondents were asked about the benefits they’ve received from social media marketing, there were some clear winners that stood out above the rest. When looking at ROI on social media marketing, money in the bank can’t be your only indicator of success. Increased traffic, lead generation and happy, connected customers all are factors in deciding which social media strategies are working best for your business.

According to the survey, the number-one benefit of social media marketing is greater exposure (85%). Improving traffic and building new partnerships followed next. More than half of marketers indicated a rise in search engine rankings was a benefit of social media marketing. The report states, “As search engine rankings improve, so will business exposure, lead generation efforts and a reduction in overall marketing expenses. More than half of marketers found social media generated qualified leads.”

This chart shows how respondents viewed the benefits of social media marketing.

Outsourcing Social Media

Because time and ROI are such a central focus for many marketers, it was surprising to see that very few were outsourcing their social media efforts. According to the report, some factors may be that social media outsourcing is fairly new and the majority of respondents were new to social media, perhaps yet unaware of what they should and should not be outsourcing.

The chart below shows how the majority of marketers are not outsourcing their social media activity.

Where we’re seeing the outsourcing trend is in the larger organizations. According to the report, “the larger the organization, the more likely outsourcing is taking place. For example, 25.7% of large businesses and 25% of mid-sized businesses are currently outsourcing, compared to only 10.6% of sole proprietors.” Like many marketing trends, what starts with the “big guys” tends to make its way to the smaller businesses—therefore, we may be seeing more outsourcing overall in the coming year.

Check out the full report here.

Now it’s your turn! Do you feel your time using social media marketing is worth the return? Does your own experience match up with the results? Share here—we want to hear from you!

How to Use Tweetups as a Marketing Strategy

Conrad Hall — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 12:19:23 +0000

Social media goes beyond Facebook or Twitter. It’s about connecting with people and developing relationships. And sometimes those connections can be literally face-to-face!

Social media allows us to make connections faster and over greater distances, but there is power in social media to bring us closer to our neighbors, too. One of the ways to do that is with a Tweetup.

What Is a Tweetup?

There are some things that just can’t be done with a 140-character limit.

A Tweetup is an in-person meeting of Twitter users. It has also become a colloquialism for any in-person networking event organized using social media.

For example, there are lots of events on Facebook that result in large parties. One I was recently involved with is Bring Gary Vaynerchuk to Chicago. The whole thing was organized through Facebook. The end result was to meet Gary in Chicago, along with a lot of other entrepreneurs, networkers and wine lovers.

How Tweetups Benefit Your Business

Obviously Gary benefited from the Facebook event by having a lot of attention drawn to his book. Did anyone else benefit?

On a personal level, Nancy S. (a friend, entrepreneur and wine connoisseur) was inspired by meeting Gary. Nancy has been hesitating about starting a new venture, and gained new confidence from the event.

Kelly Olexa, the event organizer, also benefited by hosting this event. She is now recognized as the person who brought Gary Vaynerchuk to Chicago, and she was able to network with a targeted audience during the event.

The nice thing about a Tweetup is that it doesn’t have to involve a celebrity. The key element to a successful Tweetup is having something people are interested in. Just think of parties you’ve had before and what made them successful. You’ll generally get more people to come when you give them a reason to be there.

We’ll cover how to organize a Tweetup in a second. For now, let’s take a look at three major benefits you get from a Tweetup:

Thought Leadership

This is when people recognize you as a leader and influencer of opinion. Kelly gained credibility as a thought leader by reaching out to Gary and getting him to come to Chicago.

Community-Building

By bringing people together around a common interest, you help them to get to know each other better. Whether it’s a backyard barbecue or a national convention, the most important aspect of any networking event is the conversations and relationships that develop.

Credibility-Building

The person who organizes a Tweetup is recognized as a leader and an expert. In Kelly’s case, her expertise is in media, getting the word out, and organizing events. She was able to capitalize on her complementary interest in wine to develop a major event with Gary.

Other benefits of hosting a Tweetup include:

Deeper relationships
New testimonials
Media exposure
Lead generation
Increased sales

Organizing a Tweetup

The first thing to understand about organizing a Tweetup is that it has already been done. There are lots of resources out there for you to use and make it easier for yourself.

Three of those resources are Meetup.com, Eventbrite and Amiando. They all have free elements to their service, and paid components as well.

Meetup allows you to join and participate for free. When you decide to become an organizer for events, there is a subscription fee for accessing those tools. You can subscribe for up to 6 months at a time for $12/month. You can charge for events through Meetup if you want to. They allow you to connect to Amazon Payments and PayPal to collect fees.

The great thing about Meetup is that it announces your new Meetup Group to the community. You just pick a topic, describe your Meetup, and you’re ready to go.

Eventbrite and Amiando are more like Ticketmaster. You can use them to organize events, and when you charge a ticket price they take a percentage of the sales.

Aside from using a service such as Meetup, Eventbrite or even Facebook to organize your event, there are three important organizing elements I want to draw attention to.

#1: Visit the Venue

Especially when you’re hosting the Tweetup at your business location, take time to look at the location from the perspective of guests. You might even ask a couple of friends to give you their opinions.

Here are some questions to ask yourself:

Will guests be able to have conversations without shouting at each other?
Is there enough light to read business cards?
Where will refreshments be?

#2: Use Name Tags

Everyone has an online handle, and it’s often different from their real name. Plan to have name tags that show both.

#3: Be Active During the Tweetup

To get the benefits of hosting a Tweetup, guests need to see you and meet you. Make a point of speaking to everyone and introducing yourself.

Stuart Foster wrote an excellent article for Mashable entitled Organize a Successful Tweetup. He outlines 17 things both to do and to avoid when planning and hosting a Tweetup. I suggest you print the article and keep it as a resource, but there’s something else you need to do first.

Networking Before a Tweetup

You’re going to have the most success by making sure you have lots of people to invite. To get a good crowd, you need two things:

A local network (not huge – millions or even thousands – a couple of hundred people is plenty)
A common interest

The common interest part is fairly easy, and it doesn’t have to be directly related to your business.

When the earthquake struck Haiti, you know a lot of business owners organized fundraising activities. You could easily use status updates, tweets, and email – even the telephone – to reach your network and tell them about an event like that.

The great thing about it is that everyone you tell is definitely going to tell a friend or two. Being able to help others gives everyone a good feeling.

You could be a hardware store owner and still find plenty of common interests for a Tweetup. In spring, organize an event around garden planting. For the do-it-yourself crowd, organize summertime events around barbecuing, deck installations, and landscaping.

Any time you’re stuck for an idea, just pick up the phone and call your best clients. Ask them what they’re interested in and would like to know more about. Finding a common interest is easy. Building a local network is a tiny bit more challenging. And I mean just a tiny bit because there are lots of tools to help you do it.

Naturally you’re going to start with the social media sites you already belong to. Twitter is an excellent one to use, and not just because Twitter developed Tweetups. It’s also because there are several applications and two features in Twitter designed to help. (If you don’t have a Twitter account, here’s an instruction booklet to get you started.)

One feature in Twitter is geotagging. Just login to your Twitter account and go to Settings. Check the box for Geotagging under Locations. Here’s a screenshot to show you what it looks like:

For your own profile, turn geotagging on so other people can find you. For your network, spread the word about geotagging so it becomes easier for you to find other people.

The other feature in Twitter is its Search function. You can type a city and radius into the search field to find local Twitter users. For example, someone in Toronto could type:

Near:Toronto within:50mi

This is going to show you Twitter users living within 50 miles of Toronto.

You can see from the image above that a Twitter search gives you tweets along with who made them. That can be a lot of extra information to sort through. Fortunately, there are some great services out there that help you do the work. Two I particularly enjoy are Twellow and TwitterLocal.

Twellow is yellow pages for Twitter users. You can register for a free account, but you don’t have to be registered to use the service. Twellow is cool because it lets you search Twitter users in several ways. You can search by location, interest, name, and subject, to name a few.

It also has a neat feature called Twellowhood. It lets you zero in on any geographic location in the world. (Remember what I mentioned about geotagging?) You start by picking a continent, then a state or province. When you get to an area that’s small enough – say, Ontario, Canada – Twellowhood gives you a list of cities in that province.

The number beside each city is how many Twitter users are located there. Just click on a city and you’ll get a listing of every local Twitter user.

TwitterLocal is a little different. It’s an Adobe AIR application that you download to your computer.

Once installed, TwitterLocal allows you to filter tweets by location – similar to the Twitter search function I showed you. Obviously this is handy for watching the conversations happening in your area. It can be a great way to get ideas for which common interest to tap into for your next event.

In every case, your goal is to develop new relationships with people in your locale so they can attend your Tweetups.

Keep in mind that your own existing network can help you meet local people, too. Tell them what you are doing and ask your connections to help by introducing you to local people. I was surprised at the people I was introduced to through my own network.

Cooperating With Customers

Social media has become part of our cultural and marketing landscape. We’re also generally social creatures who enjoy meeting new people and making friends.

Hosting a Tweetup allows you to cooperate with your customers to give them three important benefits:

They’re learning more about the common interest.
Everyone gets to meet new people and be social.
Guests develop a deeper relationship with you and your business.

Take your first step today. Pick a common interest and use Twitter to organize a Tweetup with 10 friends. That gives you a doable project with a safe audience. You can build from there.

Have you participated in tweetups? Post your experiences and questions below. And, even more importantly, come back to write about the experiences you have. Let’s make a conversation here that helps everyone build success with social media.

3 New Studies Show Value of Social Media & Businesses Slow Response

Amy Porterfield — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 13:00:05 +0000

There are some interesting studies surfacing lately in the world of social media. Here’s a summary of three recent research findings covering the benefits of social media marketing, how forums help brands and how businesses are employing social media marketing.

#1: 50% of Small Businesses Say Lead Generation is Biggest Benefit of Social Networking

According to the “Small Business Marketing Forecast 2010” from Ad-ology, lead generation is the biggest benefit of social networking for U.S. small businesses.

Here’s the breakdown of respondents’ top benefits of social networking:

50%: Generating leads
45%: Keeping up with the industry
44%: Monitoring online conversation
38%: Finding vendors/suppliers

This chart shows the level at which the respondents found each social networking benefit useful.

Here’s a surprising statistic: While 67% agreed that social media is a good way to increase business, 39% of those surveyed said they did not plan to use social networking in their marketing plan in 2010. This number is likely tied to the finding that 31% reported that their customers do not use social media, 29% stated they do not have enough time to devote to it and 21% said they do not know enough about social media.

Although more businesses are beginning to adopt social media strategies into their overall marketing plans, this report suggests businesses still have a long way to go before social media is fully integrated into marketing efforts.

#2: Online Forum Users Are Enthusiastic Brand Advocates

According to a recent survey published by PostRelease, people who actively contribute to online forums are overwhelmingly more engaged in “influential” activities – both online and offline – than people who don’t use forums.

What’s most interesting about these findings is that a forum contributor’s influence far extends past the walls of the forum. Here are some statistics:

79.2% of forum contributors help a friend or family member make a decision about a product purchase – compared with 47.6% of non-contributors and 53.8% overall.
65% of forum contributors share advice (offline and in person) based on information that they’ve read online – compared with 35% of non-contributors and 40.8% overall.
57.7% of forum contributors proactively recommend someone make a particular purchase – compared with 16.9% of non-contributors and 24.9% overall.

There’s also an interesting correlation between forum users and blogging. The study found that those who contribute to online forums are 10 times more likely than non-contributors to also publish a blog, and are 9 times more likely to take an active role in organizing an offline event or meeting for a group that originally met online.

For marketers who are looking to connect with the key influencers in their niche, the findings suggest that online forums are a smart place to start; however, marketers should proceed with caution. Justin Choi, founder and president of PostRelease, writes, “Online forums are great places to find enthusiastic consumers and influential brand advocates. The people in forums are often discussing specific products, sharing advice and asking each other for recommendations. For marketers, participating in that discussion is not quite as simple as jumping into a forum conversation – forums have rules about that. But there are tools for connecting in a way that’s transparent and relevant.”

Here's a snapshot of the behaviors and habits of people who contribute to forums versus the non-contributors.

#3: Only 47% of Companies Experimenting With Social Media

A study by Gartner predicts that by the end of 2010, more than 60% of Fortune 1000 companies will manage an online community. However, another study by ComBlu brings Gartner’s findings into question.

ComBlu’s study, The State of Online Branded Communities, shows how most companies do not understand how to engage within online communities and have no real idea of what their customers want on these sites. Furthermore, most companies are unaware that people interact on these sites in different ways, so many companies are merely pushing data with little or no interaction.

The report reveals that when companies do get people to join their communities, their lack of engagement is extremely obvious to the sophisticated user.

“Instead of engaging the visitor, the brand drives them away because they offer little of value. Consumers today are sophisticated users of social tools and seek out communities to learn, share and interact. If these elements are missing, or there is no obvious organizing structure that fulfills specific needs, the ‘faux’ community will be quickly abandoned,” stated the report.

Here are some interesting findings related to brands and their online community activity (or lack thereof):

47% of brands are still in the experimental phase, meaning they “exhibit lots of social activity with little connection or integration with each other.”
24% are community ghost towns, meaning there is no engagement and very few members with no return visitors.
20% show a cohesive strategy and typically had robust engagement tools and multiple activities with an active participation from their community.
9% show community overload with multiple messages to the same audience, most likely causing confusion and diluting the message.

Perhaps even more important, the study points out that some of the most effective online community best practices were used the least. Of the 135 communities they examined, only:

44 have a community manager. A community manager acts as the face of the community. Without one, there is no cohesive bond between the community sponsors and its members.
44 allow social networking. This practice allows community members to connect with each other and find shared interests, thus promoting further connection.
35 offer social bookmarking. This best practice gives community members a tool to personalize and aggregate their online experience at the brand’s destination site.

What do you think about these study findings? As always, we want to hear from you. Have you had similar results that support the data above or does your social media experience contradict the findings? Let us know your thoughts in the comment box below!

5 Tips for Finding Time for Social Media

Chris Garrett — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 12:00:51 +0000

One of the major objections I hear about social media is about time.

Do any of these sound familiar? “Who has time?” “You expect me to do all this on top of my normal duties?” “How do you fit everything in?” … and so on.

I am not going to lie to you. Social media does take time. In fact, time is going to be one of your major hidden costs of doing business on the Internet. And for some of us, that time could be wasted if we are not careful.

You need to watch where your time goes to ensure you’re spending it efficiently and with the desired impact. Here are five tips to help you.

#1: Spend Your Time Intentionally

It’s all too easy to just chit chat, browse and surf, get distracted or feel like we are making progress when really we are avoiding work and using social media “engagement and interaction” as an excuse to procrastinate. There are good conversations and wasteful conversations and you need to decide which is which.

Consider a face-to-face networking event. Do you spend all of your time speaking to one person at that event about the weather, or do you spread yourself around a bit and find new and interesting people to connect with? Are you just hanging out or do you direct your efforts toward a precise tactical aim or specific goal?

You need to know what you are doing and how you are going to measure your success.

How does this help you find time? Well, most businesses and individuals already allocate time for marketing, networking and research. If you know that your social media activities come in under one of those headings, and your efforts in social media are going to achieve equal or better results to other things you could do under those headings, then you are equipped to carve out time to try social media instead.

#2: Carve Out Time Where Social Media Is More Efficient

Because of my social media efforts, I no longer have to pitch, write proposals or go to sales meetings. I have never had to cold-call for my own business, and I do not write competitive bids.

How much time could you save if you didn’t have to do this kind of sales lead generation or closing?

In my previous job, I would have to spend more than six hours in a car just so I could go to one 30-minute sales presentation competing with several other companies with very little differentiation between us. Not only was it soul-destroying and a colossal waste of time, it was actually very ineffective.

I am not saying you will be able to 100% replace your old way of doing things with social media right away, and I would not suggest that is wise even if you could. But you should be able to take an hour or two out of a week to test social media and see how the results look. In fact, combining approaches usually works best, as each technique and medium compounds the results of the others. Reaching prospects through a multi-channel approach is normally much better than the sum of the parts.

The great thing about social media is you can pretty much get involved anywhere and any time.

#3: Use “Dead” Time

How much time do you spend just waiting? I was recently at a conference in Las Vegas and because of the long-haul nature of the travel and the fact that I would be alone much of the time, I did a lot of hanging around and waiting, which I filled with social media. Just think of your average business trip… What do you spend a lot of time doing?

Flights
Taxis
Queues
Departure lounges
Restaurants
Meetings
Hotels
…?

If, however, you have an Internet-connected laptop or smart phone, you can at least use some of this time to stay connected, engage with people, write some content or otherwise go from “hanging around” to being semi-productive. If nothing else, you will feel like you are not all alone in the world!

How long does it take to check your messages and send out a tweet, status update, check out a link, or answer a question? Seconds? Minutes at most?

How many times during the day do you get the odd 10 minutes where you are simply waiting?

Even at my desk I have to sit and wait, watching progress bars as something calculates, prints, renders or uploads. Those are prime “check what is happening in social media” times!

What if you find you have more than a few minutes to spare?

#4: Escape, Bulk-Produce, Store Up and Schedule

On those occasions when you have a good chunk of time, make the best possible use of that time and get a power hour of content produced.

Outline and write a set of blog posts to go out later when you are too busy
Brainstorm and create ideas, mind map your thoughts and generate headlines
Plan for the future, write up an editorial calendar, “most like to meet” list or line up meetings with people with whom you have lost contact
Get organized and make your week more efficient with tasks, to-dos, filing and an empty inbox
Write out some interesting tweets to go out over the next week so you only have to check in and reply each day

One of my friends “escapes” to the coffee shop a couple of times a week and does all his content creation and planning for that week in those few concentrated hours. Being out of the office with zero interruptions (other than the constant stream of fresh latte) means he can bang out several quality items and his brain cooperates, rather than fights against his productivity with distractions and… Ooh, shiny!

#5: Just Relax

My last point is that this is not meant to be a chore. Nobody is testing you, tracking your use of time or holding you to any grading system. It should be useful and it should be fun!

Aim to build a reputation for being helpful and providing value, and most of all being a real human being. Then people will be much more forgiving and understanding. You do not need to be perfect.

If you do not post an article this week, so what? Your Twitter followers might be concerned if you do not appear for a few days, but they are not going to start saying bad things about you if you are too busy to tweet!

For me, social media is primarily social. It is my coffee break. Yes, I do find it a very effective set of tools for my business, but I also deeply appreciate the people who are at the other end of those avatars and tools. If you keep relationships foremost in your mind and do not treat social media as something you have to do or else, you will have much greater success at it!

What do you think? Have you struggled to find time? How do you find time for social media? Please share your comments below…