How to avoid the social media black hole
There’s no doubt social media grows online businesses. The trick is to accomplish growth without getting sucked into the black hole of time ì spending hours and hours without measurable results. My free email class on photography web marketing covers one way to avoid the time suck using automation.
Social Media Workflow with Automation
With multiple social media profiles in place, you definitely need help from tools to automate content management. Here’s my social media workflow, which you can borrow as you like.
At the beginning of the month I write all my blog posts in WordPress.org and schedule them to release on different days throughout the month (typically Tuesday at 5am). WP to Twitter plug-in will automatically post the headline to my Twitter account when each post goes live. You can also use the Wordbooker plugin to auto post to Facebook, but I prefer just to pull everything from Twitter over to Facebook using Mashable’s tips on how to connect Twitter and Facebook. My blog posts also post to my LinkedIn profile using the Blog Link application. I used to have Google Buzz (google.com/profiles) stream my blog posts but I stopped using Buzz because I found my audience wasn’t using it.
As I find helpful links, I save them online in the delicious.com bookmarking tool. I added my Twitter account in the settings so I can type a tweet for the URLs I want to share publicly. For helpful URLs I want to share, but not save forever as a bookmark, I’ll post to my http://bit.ly where I can tweet a message and shorten the URL at the same time. This account has stats so I can see which tweets got the most traction and I’ll use this knowledge to start sharing similar content at peaks times of usage. Of course Facebook picks up these links too since it pulls everything that goes through my Twitter account. That covers the approximately 1/3 of my social activity, but the more important part is the 2/3 of networking and relationship building.
I use a social media dashboard program to manage multiple networks from the same location. Hootsuite.com (the free version) helps me monitor activity across Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn so I can send messages to my connections and comment on their activity. If I have a new product, I’ll schedule a message about it to appear across all networks at once. I usually create between three and five similar messages to increase my chance of the message being seen. Hootsuite allows automatic publish of blog posts using your blog’s RSS feed if you find this easier than some of the recommendations above.
I hope you enjoyed the quick tips. Look for me again in a future email called “An alternative to email newsletters that saves hours.”
Zach Prez
Photography Marketing Consultant
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Zach Prez is a dad and social cyclist who loves to talk marketing over a cup of Lipton tea. Connect with him at www.facebook.com/zachprez. |
