The Social Enthusiast

Adding social media as a communications channel begins with the efforts of internal social media evangelists for many companies.  If you’ve added social media activity to your  work responsibilities, it’s important to make the best possible use of your available time.  For one thing, it’ll help you keep your sanity, for another, it makes it easier to combat the almost-universal “are you wasting time on the internet?” question.  Here are a few tips to help.

1. Keep a small footprint. After you’ve claimed your company’s brand name on any relevant social sites, narrow it down to a short list of only two or three of the most high-value, relevant sites to maintain an ongoing presence on.  Spreading yourself too thin is a major source of wasted time.  It’s better to focus on creating a bigger impact on one or two sites than to try to be everywhere all the time.

2. Smart multitasking. Hellotxt and Ping.fm are tools that can speed things up by allowing you to post to multiple services at once.  However, those two only allow you to post as a broadcast tool–they’re of limited usefulness when it comes to listening and responding.  Other tools can make it easier to do quick “spot checks.” Desktop clients like Seesmic and Tweetdeck allow you to set up searches for your brand keywords, and monitor or update multiple accounts from one screen.  You can keep it minimized and check it quickly at predetermined times during the day.

3.  Track EVERYTHING.  If you’re hoping to demonstrate the value of your social media activity on your employer’s behalf, it’s important to keep track of the amount of time you’re spending, the specific activities you’re engaging in, and possibly most importantly, the results.  Go to Icerocket’s Trend Tool or a similar tool and take baseline measurements of how often your company’s brand is showing up in social media compared to competitors–then look again after you’ve been working to raise that visibility for a couple of months.  If you’re running the company fan page–make sure you capture the insights data on a regular basis.  If you have access to the company’s website analytics, look to see how many new visitors are coming from social profiles that you’re managing.  In short, make sure you’re documenting anything that can demonstrate that you’re adding value to the company with your efforts.

Have you got any handy time management tips that you’ve picked up in managing social media as a small part of a bigger set of responsibilities?  Share them in the comments!  We’d love to hear about it.