The Side Note

Think you can spend just one hour each day on social media? Gini Dietrich of Arment Dietrich recommends it, and she makes it sound so simple. While it’s beneficial to your company to utilize social media, it’s not beneficial to let it take up too much of your time.

Following are abridged versions of Gini’s tips on how to spend an hour a day on social media:

1) Sign up for an account at TweetLater.

2) Spend 15 minutes every day finding industry articles, news you find interesting, and thought leadership pieces that have nothing to do with you or your business and set those up to be distributed throughout the day. A good rule of thumb is that 60 percent of your tweets should not be self-serving.

3) Spend 10 minutes every day setting up your “self-serving” tweets – these are links to your blog, white papers the company has written, any articles written about you or that quote you, Webinars or podcasts you’re hosting, etc. Gini says a good rule of thumb is these should be only 40 percent of your tweets and you should space them out so they don’t come out all at once.

4) Spend 10 minutes going through your groups on TweetDeck and find things to RT (retweet) for your followers. This expands your follower base, shows that you listen, and provides great influence.

5) Spend five minutes setting up ping.fm and using that to distribute your content to your other social networks, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Delicious.

6) Spend 10 minutes going through your LinkedIn groups and answering questions where you have expertise and can position yourself as a thought leader.

7) Spend 10 minutes responding to people on Facebook and Twitter.

Gini certainly has it down to a science. And I really like the idea of only spending an hour a day on social media, which can sometimes be a time sucker. I’m going to try following her tips with both the agency’s and my clients’ social media tools and see how it works out. I’ll keep you posted.

Do you have any great tips on how to spend social media time more effectively?