May 24th, 2010
Social Media Marketing, how to keep the time suck under control
Hi, everyone. At PaperBox Books, we use social media to connect the readers to our books. For a new author the thought of posting, tweeting, blogging, Linkedin posting and every other social media activity can be overwhelming.
Personally, I write 1 blog as a Project Manager and contribute to this blog. I also have two author blogs I need to keep active: Alice Griffiths and PA Wilson. Along with the blogs, come twitter, Facebook and a number of forums I participate in. I was feeling overwhelmed because I was spending 90 min to 2 hours a day just marketing. This wasn’t sustainable because one of the things you can’t do is be on and off with your social medial marketing – consistency is required!
I spent some time trying to get a handle on what I could do in a week but what happened is I just kept cutting out activities without understanding where I needed to put my effort. This week I changed my approach. Rather than try to figure out what I can do within my week I decided to figure out what was really taking the time.
Let’s just look at my activity on blog comments and Linkedin discussion contributions.
First, I find inspiration for my blogs in other people’s blogs and comments. Then I find opportunities to comment on blogs and Linkedin suggestions from what I follow on my gmail accounts.
I would browse postings and discussions until I found something I could comment on, sometimes this took most of the hour. It never took more than a minute to comment, or join the discussion.
Now let’s look at today – my first day on my new approach.
I set my iTouch stopwatch to find out what the time suck really was. I opened Gmail and started looking for blogs and discussions. Epiphany #1. I didn’t need to read beyond the ones I commented on – reading was a separate activity. I quickly scanned the headlines and found two Linkedin discussions, commented and move on to my googlereader account.
Using the same concept, I scanned headlines found 2 I had comments to contribute and stopped looking. Total time for this set of activities – 15 minutes. So, not really 90 min to 2 hours 
I went back and read the remaining discussions and blog posts, but because I had completed my social media tasks, I didn’t feel like I was marketing for the whole time.
So, the tip is to focus on the real activity, not on all the time you spend around the activity, and you will be less overwhelmed.
Happy writing.
Perry