Making the time to execute on a social media strategy can rattle even the most experienced marketers.  Unlike traditional marketing, social media marketing can present many different challenges and distractions.  According to a study by eMarketer 73% of marketers say finding the time to create content as their biggest marketing challenge.

I recently ran a poll of @TopRank Twitter followers to get a sense of how they spend their time online.  I asked “If you had only 20 minutes a day to spend on social media what would you focus on?”  Some of the answers we received were:

• @henryroominates – “I would try to connect with powerful Twitter users and Tweet content from my blog.”
• @SebastianX – “I’d read my Twitter Followanyday List.”
• @Paco_Belle – “Look at 2-3 Twitter lists, couple circles on G+, scroll Facebook timeline & look through my RSS feeds for new things.”
• @Paramountbuzz – “Engaging others…doing it now.”
• @GreenDolphin_ – “My RSS feed, Twitter, Pinterest, and Facebook.”

If you are involved with implementing social media marketing, you know that 20 minutes a day just won’t cut it.  On top of implementing social media tactics, there’s also the task fo staying current. Lee’s post “11 Ways to Get Smarter & Stay Current in a World of Social Information Overload“ outlined how much time can be involved using social tools to collect, filter and curate social media marketing knowledge.

Avoiding Shiny Object Pitfalls

Reuters estimates that the average worker loses 2.1 hours of productivity every day to interruptions and distractions.  To avoid wasting time begin by prioritizing your week.  While it’s true that unexpected issues can come up plan for the best and the worst.  If you have 3 hours per day on average to complete tasks related to social media strategy what will you get accomplished in those 3 hours?  If you were only to have 1.5 hours per day what would you want to get accomplished?  Proper planning will lead to improved productivity and efficiency.  Also, take some time to determine what your top distractions are and eliminate them.

Optimize for Productivity

Focus on what will have the largest impact on your productivity. Determining what time of day you are most productive, and which activities are most significant will help you to stay on track.  Are you an early riser, night owl, or somewhere in between?  Creating a daily schedule and routine can significantly improve your productivity.  You will also want to keep in mind statistical data which points to the best times of day and days of the week for engaging in social media activity.  A recent infographic by KISSmetrics on “The Science of Social Timing” provides valuable insight into the best times of day to share or engage on sites like Facebook and Twitter.  Some of the findings include:

Twitter

• 5pm – best time to Tweet for re-tweets
• 1-4 per hour – most effective frequency of Tweets
• Midweek & Weekends – best days to Tweet
• Noon & 6pm – best time to Tweet for increase Click Through Rates

Facebook

• Saturday- best day to share on Facebook
• Noon- most effective time to share on Facebook
• .5 per day – best sharing frequency

Tips for an Optimized Focus

Now lets talk about some no brainer “don’ts” that the many of us “do”.  Let me know if any of these sound familiar to you:

• Your best friend is having problems with their significant other so you keep your phone close, just in case…
• It’s baseball season and your team is playing but you don’t have the day off, thank goodness for internet radio right…
• You have email anxiety which forces you to check email every couple minutes because you never know what you might miss…
• One of your colleagues is obsessed with chatting online and pings you every couple minutes with a question or joke…
• You’re scheduling Tweets, posting on your personal facebook page, and reading Psychology Today all at the same time, because after all you are a master multi-tasker…

I too have often thought that I could do everything at once.  A balancing act acquired from years of having too much to do, and not enough time.  I considered multi-tasking an art form and a higher form of organization than my counterparts who only focused on one thing at a time.  I could not have been more wrong.  In recent years I’ve had to buckle down and force myself to devote all of my attention to one task at a time.  I’ve found that the quality of my work has improved and the level of my stress has decreased significantly.  Some tactics that have worked for me include:

• Closing my email when I’m working on social media tasks
• Close all Internet windows and tabs except for the one I need to work on
• Disabling chat or closing chat windows to avoid distraction
• Pick 15 minutes a day to indulge in activities such as checking personal social media profiles, responding to texts, or chatting with friends.
• Spend 30 minutes to an hour each morning reviewing emails and responding, do the same thing before leaving at the end of the day.
• It is significantly easier to stick to your schedule if you are working ONLY on the tasks you have scheduled in the time allotted.

Tools for Optimizing Your Time

Depending on your available time and social media content strategy, there are many tools that can help you accomplish more with less time.  Below are three different types of tools that social media marketers can use to get the most out of their time:

Curation Tools – good for quickly gathering and automatically sharing content

• Scoop.it
• Storify
• Pearltrees

Social Aggregators & Management Tools –  follow and engage with multiple platforms

• Hootsuite
• Tweetdeck
• Seesmic
• Here’s a list of 22 social media management tools

Social Bookmarking – effective means of organizing and storing social bookmarks

• StumleUpon
• Reddit
• Delicious
• Evernote – not a bookmarking tool exactly but very useful for curating

Next Steps

I’m sure you’ll agree that focus and time management are something that most of us can relate to.  Based on what was covered in this post, consider the following questions and determine what you can do to better focus on the tasks at hand:

• What are your top 3 social media goals and do you have a plan for reaching them?
• How much time can you dedicate each day to using tactics to reach these goals?
• What steps can you take to improve your focus while completing social media activities?
• Which type of tool: curation, aggregator, or social bookmarking can you use to help save time?

If  you are looking for additional tips on Optimizing your SEO, social media, and content strategies be sure to take a look at the new book: “Optimize: How to Attract & Engage More Customers By Integrating SEO, Social Media, and Content Marketing.”

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Optimize Your Social Media Schedule: 4 Tips for Avoiding the Social Media Time Suck is a post from: How To Get Backlinks To Your Site

When people hear about social media marketing, many tend to think about popular social media sites like Facebook,LinkedIn, MySpace and YouTube. YouTube has about 258 million users, and more than 50 percent of them log in weekly. Facebook has about 101 million users with more than 50 percent who log in daily.

If you haven’t spent any time on these sites, I highly recommend setting up an account and jumping into a conversation or community. It’s one thing to talk about social media marketing and another to experience it firsthand. You’ll be a more effective social media marketer if you’re already a participant.

What is Social Media?

Social media essentially is a category of online media where people are talking, participating, sharing, networking, and bookmarking online. Most social media services encourage discussion, feedback, voting, comments, and sharing of information from all interested parties.

It’s more of a two-way conversation, rather than a one-way broadcast like traditional media. Another unique aspect of social media is the idea of staying connected or linked to other sites, resources, and people.

Kinds of Social Media

Many social media sites come in the form of a blog, microblog, podcast, videocast, forum, wiki, or some kind of content community. To help you understand social media better, let’s break them down into basic forms or groups.

• Social news: Sites like Digg, Sphinn, Newsvine, and BallHype let you read about news topics and then vote and/or comment on the articles. Articles with more votes get promoted to a more prominent position.
• Social sharing: Sites like Flickr, Snapfish, YouTube, and Jumpcut let you create, upload, and share videos or photos with others.
• Social networks: Sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, and Twitter allow you to find and link to other people. Once linked or connected, you can keep up to date with that person’s contact info, interests, posts, etc. Many people are connecting to friends and business associates with whom they had fallen out of touch. It’s bringing the world together like nothing else has.
• Social bookmarking: Sites like Delicious, Faves, StumbleUpon, BlogMarks and Diigo allow you to find and bookmark sites and information of interest. You can save your bookmarks online and access them from anywhere or share them with others.

This is just a sampling of social media sites. More are added daily. Breaking them down into these categories or groups will help you understand their focus and to consider which avenue is right for your approach to social media marketing.

Social Media Benefits

Let’s look at the general scope of social media universe. Did you know:

• Five of the top 10 fastest-growing Web brands are user-generated content sites?
• Sixty-seven percent of businesses say that the best source for advice on products and services are their consumers?
• Forty-five percent of adult Internet users have created content online?
• There are about 1.2 million blog posts per day?

So do you think it would benefit you to tap into this ever-growing universe of social media? Absolutely! Many companies are trying to figure out how to get involved. They’re shifting money from traditional marketing budgets to social media marketing because it:

• Helps manage your company’s or brand’s reputation.
• Builds brand awareness and helps improve how people view your brand.
• Gets you closer to your customers. Learn about their needs then respond. Discuss converse, debate.
• Offers creative and effective ways to learn insights not previously available.
• Features new and inexpensive ways to support your clients.
• Is typically less expensive than traditional advertising.
• Offers various ways to measure and track performance.

A good corporate example to illustrate many of these principles is from Dell. They started Ideastorm, where people can post ideas and have them voted on. Can you say free market research? Who better to tell you how to create or improve your products and services than your customers? Cool, huh?

Now that we have a basic understanding of what social media marketing is and its benefits, the next step is to learn more about how to build your own social media strategy. That’s next in Part 2 which you can get by subscribing to our Newsletter.

In the meantime, take a look at my Social Marketing Tool of choice. This puppy works 24/7 on the background bookmarking my articles just as if I where doing it myself. In other words, I don’t get blocked for spamming because I follow the Terms Of Services, and Bookmarking Demon allows me to do just that!:

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Social Media Marketing 101, Part 1 is a post from: How To Get Backlinks To Your Site