Lately I’ve found myself spending most of my days looking for stuff to tweet, following other people’s links and staying up to date with my Twitter feeds. How much of this can be attributed as real work is questionable and with the to-do list growing and less getting done it’s time to implement some business productivity management.

So to get the right mix between getting work done and having time to engage in effective social media I’ve come up with the following system:

1. Steamline Twitter and Facebook into separate feeds so I don’t have to go through pages of Tweets on different subjects. I’m using Hootsuite for this as it puts all social networking activity in one place. There are lots of tools like this to manage your twitter feeds and other social networks but I won’t go into them in this post.

2. Get my content sources aggregated into 2 places. One is Google reader where I put RSS feeds from sites and blogs  I choose to subscribe to. The other is popurls which aggregates news from all over the place in one big searchable page.

3. Organise my time around getting things done. I won’t go into great detail here about time management but when I sit down to accomplish a certain task I like to turn off any possible distractions like email notifications (I close my email program), instant messages and that Twitter tab with (150) new tweets you just have to check every 2 minutes..

So for example let’s say I’m setting up a squeeze page and writing a blog post for a client. These are two tasks I have to accomplish today, preferably in enough time so that I can take the rest of the day off afterwards This is how the day would go:

• Beginning of the day – switch on computer.
• Check emails, look at the charts for any trades for today (if life weren’t complicated enough I trade forex and commodities as well!).
• Check Twitter/Facebook.
• Check Content feeds for interesting and relevant items to tweet and tweet if applicable.
• Close down email client and web browser tabs with Hootsuite/Google Reader/PopURLs.
• Do task #1 – set up squeeze page for client #1
• When finished check email, Facebook, Twitter, any open trades and new trade opportunities.
• Tweet something/retweet/reply to someone else’s tweet – catch up on tweets.
• Have lunch.
• Check email, Facebook, Twitter, any open trades and new trade opportunities.
• Tweet something/retweet/reply to someone else’s tweet – catch up on tweets.
• Close down email client and web browser tabs with Hootsuite/Google Reader/PopURLs.
• Do task #2 write blog post for client
• Check email, Facebook, Twitter, any open trades and new trade opportunities.
• Tweet something/retweet/reply to someone else’s tweet – catch up on tweets.

For a small business using social media as a marketing tool it’s essential that you organise your SMO activities around your regular business activities. Social media doesn’t have to be a productivity killer.

Since adding them a few days ago I’ve had 2 messages in my inbox which have both been marketing messages – goodbye!

- Accepting your friend request does not equal ‘opting-in’ to your ‘list’ –

This is something a lot of marketers need to get into their heads when using social media to build their business. It is very easy to reach a lot of people through these networks and that can be good and bad, depending on how you do it. Let’s have a look at both approaches and the effects they both have:

The bad way - You join all these networks, go through searching and adding as many people as you can then start marketing directly to them.

Results:

• You annoy a lot of people who will ‘unfriend’ you
• Probably get your business labelled as spammy.
• Yes you might make a few sales but at what longer term cost?

The good way – You join these networks, go through searching and adding as many people as you can then start sharing content with them. This can be content on your business website or blog that adds value to these visitors and also pre-sells on you and your business.

Results – If they like what they’ve seen so far they are a lot more likely to:

• Take you up on your offer.
• If not they might refer someone else (that’s leverage!)
• link to you from their website or blog (free traffic and search engine improvements)
• share your free and high quality content with their groups of friends (that’s leverage!)
• Sign up for your newsletter (that’s opting-in to recieve marketing messages).
• There’s also a high chance that the next time you share some good free content with your social network they’ll check it out.

Effective Social Media Marketing in 5 Easy Steps

For some people creating relevant, useful and compelling content to share is a breeze. For others it’s a bit daunting. If you fall into the latter catagory then here are some steps you can take to quickly research and create something worth sharing:

1. Do some keyword research – Use something like the Google Adwords Keyword Tool to find some phrases that have large search volumes

2. Do some Q&A research – Go to places like Yahoo Answers and plug in your high search volume phrases (from step 1) and see what comes out. Look for recurring topics, questions, answers and find a popular one.

3. Find a way that your product/service/offer helps solve the problem, answer the question and generally help your target customer achieve the end result that’s the goal of whatever the question is related to.

4. Create a quick ‘how-to’ guide on how to achieve the end result the question is related to in X amount of steps.

5. Put this guide onto your website or blog with a call to action at the end to see how your product/service/offer can help them achieve this goal that much more quickly/effectively/guaranteed.

6. Summarise this guide into a bitesize chunk and share that with your social networks. A title or short description and a link to the full article on your site.

In Summary

Using this method you’re using social media the way it is intended to be used – and growing your business in the process. This intermediary step of creating and sharing content is vital, and as you’ve just seen.. it shouldn’t be that hard at all.

If you’re interested in learning more about implementing effective social media and other internet marketing strategies for your business please get in touch here