January 8, 2008 Comments (4)
On the heels of my own post about the social media time sink, I ran across one by Chris Winfield over at Search Engine Land offering up some advice on the best use of your time when it comes to social media.
Chris offers up his top ten list of social media options worth spending your time on as well as an estimate of just how much time you should be spending.
There are some on there that I covered in my post (reducing the number of feeds you follow, avoiding some of the more "fun" oriented social networks), but there are also some great suggestions.
Specifically:
#8 - Answer. Answer 5 questions per day in your niche on Yahoo! Answers. Link drop to one of your sites every 5th answer. Time Spent: 15 Minutes per day.
#9 - Join the Conversation. Once per day, use a tool such as Google Blog Search or Serph to search for your name and your company. See where people are talking about you and join in on the conversation. Time Spent: Varies on your company but should be less than 20 minutes.
Read through his list and consider using some of these ideas as your starting point for budgeting your social media time in 2008.
Rather than cutting out the number of blogs / feeds you subscribe to, maybe reorganize them and keep the most valuable ones within your daily reading list.
The rest can be there for searching and digging through for research and other times when you have more time or need specific data.
Accomplish the trimming down as well as make your rss archives a valuable data resource at your fingertips.
Jennifer,
I've only been reading your blog for a short time, but it's one of the ones I come back to regularly. Thanks for the great content.
I hadn't thought about Yahoo! Answers as a way to increase your presence in social media. When I checked it out today, it seems like everyone uses a nickname instead of their real names. I spent about thirty minutes reading through the questions and answers in business and didn't see a single full name.
Is there an issue with using your real name? And, if you can't use your real name, what's the point? (Other than adding value to society by spending time sharing your wisdom, of course.)
Melissa,
Not that I know of...though I haven't used Yahoo Answers. I'll drop a line to Matt Mcgee of SmallBusinessSEM.com and see if he'll pop by and answer that for you. I know he uses Yahoo Answers.
Incidentally, I read your blog post on not sure if you love or hate Twitter yet. ;) I know how you feel. I thought Twitter was stupid and ignored it for ages. Then I figured I better give it a whirl. If you'd like, you can check out the series I wrote on it. Part one is here.
Oh yes and welcome aboard! Always glad to meet a new reader. :) Any chance we'll meet you in person this month at our Small Business Marketing Unleashed conference?
Jennifer,
Looks like a great conference, but I'll have to miss it.
I've started reading your posts on Twitter. Good stuff and great links. I got into Twitter because one of the guys on my marketing team seemed to be spending a lot of time on it. Before I got too critical and asked him to focus on something more productive, I figured I had better know what I'm talking about.
In the four months or so that he's been involved with Twitter, he has made some very useful business connections for our organization. I have yet to make any great connections, but I'm still in the "lurking" stage. I feel like I'm at a party where I don't know anyone yet. I'm still working up the courage to join a conversation. Apparently, I am an "e-introvert"!
Melissa
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