Social Media for Business: How to Manage Your Time

My business partner, Dean Guadagni and I speak to groups about social media on average twice a week. Invariably the question comes up with each group, “How much time do you spend on social media?”

This question was raised again this morning from the back of the room, and a voice near the front of the room yelled out, “It’s a time suck!”

My reply:  It is if you let it be. You can avoid the time suck by having a strategy.

Clara Shih, creator of the first business application for Facebook,  refers to Facebook as the new CRM and describes social networking sites as relationship tools that allow us to be both more aware and better able to engage with our outer networks.

I spent 20 years in the world of CRM, first in magazine circulation, then in catalog. It was a direct mail world where the costs to connect were in our face. We spent many hours strategically planning who we’d mail, when, and what to meet our particular business goal. If the projections we ran on a particular customer or prospect didn’t appear to meet our objectives, they were eliminated from the mailing. After all, we couldn’t afford to waste our resources.

This is how any business needs to approach social media. Time is just as much a commodity as the checks you write to printers,  list brokers and the U.S. Postal Service.

How to invest smartly in social media:

• Identify one goal that will drive all your efforts
• Define your target audience and where they can be reached
• Develop a strategy for reaching out to them
• Develop ways to engage your audience
• Develop ways to measure your efforts
• Don’t allow your efforts to stray from your strategic plan

Photo credit: fjny