I don’t think I would be anywhere near as productive as I am in social media today without having tools, systems and processes to monitor and organize my expanding network. They really have been the secret to my success, and of my clients’ success. In the work that I do in social media, time management and feeling overwhelmed are always the biggest concerns that I hear—but they don’t have to be.
A Careful Balance
Automation is all about leveraging your time and energy, but often you will hear people say that this goes against the whole idea of social media being about building and nurturing relationships. However, there are ways to automate some of your social media efforts—without detracting from cultivating your authentic voice and personality when it comes to your online presence.
Identifying valuable resources, like blog posts, websites or quotes that you believe would be helpful or valuable to your Twitter followers and pre-scheduling sharing this content would be one example. The nature of tweets like these is that they are essentially one-way communication and don’t depend on you being available when they are posted in order to field some kind of “real time” response. Therefore, this kind of content is ideal for pre-scheduling in advance. A tool like Hootsuite is great for easily setting these kinds of updates up.
Keep Your Voice
The most common way to delegate in social media is via a virtual assistant, but it’s important to note that it’s not recommended that you delegate anything that contains your personality or voice. A specific example of an ideal task to delegate would be having someone track and monitor your reputation and brand via search.twitter.com or the search feature on Facebook.
When thinking about delegation, stick to housekeeping, administrative or organizational tasks not related to the conversation—for example, approving Facebook friend requests with an established criteria or using criteria to find more people to follow on Twitter. Other tasks would be to do the initial research on ideal people on Facebook to send friend requests to, pre-scheduling tweets as mentioned earlier, creating events in Facebook, researching quality blogs, sites and links that contain good content for you to share via tweets and Facebook updates, managing your Facebook inbox, adding new business-related applications to your Fan Page and more.
Don’t Get Stuck
One of the biggest mistakes that people make—especially those who are new to social media—is that they start to get stuck in a cycle of automating, broadcasting and automating—over and over. It’s very difficult to generate positive results this way. However, automating and delegating appropriate activities while still taking the time to engage in regular conversation can be the perfect blend—so that you can leverage your time and still maximize your success.
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Christine this post is really helpful, thank you! I’ve recently hired a VA and have her doing some wonderful things for me but haven’t (YET) asked her to handle any of my social media— I was wondering WHAT to have her handle, if anything, BECAUSE of what you stated about social media requiring our voice and our personality. I will definitely be moving forward with more social media participation in 2010 with more ability to outsource and automate. Thank you!
Heather Price´s last blog ..Date Code Calculator: How Old Is Your Makeup?
@Heather–Perfect! So glad to be of help and to clarify. Good for you for bringing a VA on board–smart move!
Hi Christine,
First of all thank you for the e-course. I’ve really enjoyed your tips and i guess I’m now more interested in really immersing myself with social media.As a freelancer, It has been a great help to me. And all these tools are making it a lot easier for me to learn as well. I use Hootsuite as well as Seesmic.
Florante´s last blog ..Six Things I’ve Learned as Freelancer in 2009
Hi Florante, you are very welcome. Yes, I would say social media is a great skill for a freelancer to have, both for your clients and marketing your own services. Isn’t Hootsuite great? It’s so versatile–I actually prefer it now over desktop clients.