Optimizing social media can sometimes be difficult. It’s easy to drift into the wave of instant gratification: get your news as it happens, tweet or post on a company’s Facebook page and get a response in minutes, post new blog content to your Facebook page and get likes or shares within minutes. Getting immediate positive responses is intoxicating, but these quick notes can also cause problems in your personal life in areas such as work-life balance.
News outlets including CBS and The Huffington Post have published stories about how social media can destroy relationships. Don’t waste precious moments with loved ones browsing Facebook or Twitter.
Sometimes people who use social media for business purposes are given a little more room when it comes to letting social media infiltrate their lives outside of work. After all, social media is their job. But that does not make this intrusion into their personal lives acceptable. do not worry! You have ways to make sure your social media life stays separate from your real life.
Set limits for SMO
While our mothers have tried to teach us, there is a place and a time for everything. SMO doesn’t have to be everywhere at all times, nor should it be! It can be hard to pull yourself away from your accounts at first, but it will be better to do so in the long run.
Here are some ways to organize your life on social media to make it more manageable:
- Set aside a regular portion of time for SMO and stick to it. Devote a significant portion of the time during the day to attending your social media accounts. This part of the time could be 30 minutes every 3 or 4 hours, or it could be 1 hour when you come each morning and right before you leave for the day. Test different times, and see what works best for you.
- Delegate tasks when you can. If possible, hand the reins of your social media accounts to a trusted colleague or employee. Doing so will allow you to shift your attention to other responsibilities, and it’s a good idea to take a fresh look at what’s happening in your company’s social media world. Who knows – someone else might have some insight into ways to improve your SMO practices.
- When other people are participating, put electronic devices away. If you are at a meeting, at dinner with your spouse, or at a football match for your child, put your phone away. Put it in a desk drawer or pocket, or leave it in the car. If you are at your desk, turn off the computer sound and screen. Show visitors that you are present and care what they have to say. Eliminate the temptation, and you won’t feel the need to look at your screen every time you hear a ding for a new tweet or blog comment.
- If it’s time to sign out, get out. Some people have a hard time resisting the temptation to take a quick peek at what’s going on in the world of social media. If you’re one of those people, sign out of your accounts and, if possible, turn off your phone, even for an hour or so.
Repost to fill in the gaps
It is very beneficial to spread the content across different social media channels to get maximum benefit for your money. You can also repost content. There’s nothing wrong with posting the same link to your recent blog post, provided you don’t do it once every hour and it’s all you post.
It is generally acceptable to repost the same content once a week for the first month and then perhaps once every two months. This way, you get more miles from your content without annoying your followers and fans with the same content over and over again.
You can also share the content of other pages or retweet a link posted by another Twitter user. Fortunately, Facebook and Twitter make it easy to give credibility to original sources. Always make sure to keep the creator username on your post so it doesn’t look like you’re trying to steal someone else’s content.
Use schedulers
Being able to schedule social media posts ahead of time can seem like bee’s knees and the solution to all your time management issues. However, you should use this capability with caution.
Scheduling helps keep social media accounts fresh and active even when they are not managed by a live person. These tools save time. They allow you to shift your attention elsewhere, focusing on the most pressing issues; And they might save you some money if you’re thinking of hiring someone whose only job is to manage your SMO.
What these tools don’t do is automatically cancel posts, for example, if a natural disaster occurs somewhere else in the world. If a scandal arises in your organization, for example, your scheduled posts do not pick up on that scandal and adjust the content accordingly. You leave the status of your brand in the hands of the world, and you can look like you don’t care about anything but what happens in your business if you’re not careful.
This is an unfortunate example. On April 13, 2013, two bombs exploded during the Boston Marathon, killing three people and wounding more than 260 others. Social media expert Jay Kawasaki explained the downside of using Twitter automation when his account continued to post links to his blogs and other marketing messages, while the Twitterverse was lit up with news updates and tweets about the unimaginable tragedy. The failure to turn off the auto-post feature made him appear very insensitive, and people weren’t afraid to tell him.