Prime Lending June Newsletter

5 Tips to Fit Social Media into Your Busy Workday

Using social media to market your business shouldn’t take up most of your workday, but you do need to carve out some time for it.

Unfortunately, there are plenty of reasons why people don’t bother doing that. They tell themselves things like: I’m too busy with important work, I can’t see any value in it, I don’t know what to post, I can’t figure out the tools, I think social media is just for kids.

But deep down inside, most business people know they really should spend more time with social media. Here are 5 tips to help you find the time to fit social media into your busy schedule.

1. Understand the importance of social media to your business.
With all the professional and personal demands on you, there’s only one way to find the time to blog, tweet, share, and comment: you make the time for social media because you know it’s important. The truth is, as a business person, you need to do more online than just consume content or share what others have created. You also need to be a content creator, because that ultimately will build your business.

2. Take a good hard look at how you spend your day.
A recent survey revealed that we business people spend more than one fourth of our day (28%) dealing with emails. We’re in meetings for 19% of the day and we think half of them are a total waste of time. Another 25% of the day is taken up with meaningless distractions. A second study reported that executives spend up to 33% of the day in meetings. What all this tells us is that finding the time for social media is just a matter of making it a priority over unimportant emails, non-productive meetings, and a list of activities that are just daily distractions.

3. Make a commitment to spend a small amount of time on social media every day.
Consider this your daily social business investment. Spread out your activities. Tweet daily, but perhaps post to your blog just once a week. Share links and comment on other sites as the opportunities arise, but limit these pursuits to ten or fifteen minutes a day. Amazingly, this small daily commitment soon adds up. In a year, you’ve tweeted hundreds of times, written dozens of blog posts, connected with a good group of people, and discovered lots of things you didn’t think you’d be learning about.

4. Be guided by your strongest interests.
Blog, tweet, share, and comment on the things you care about most (of course, keep it work-related and avoid politics and religion). It takes far less time to write about and share the things you really know about and appreciate. It also attracts an audience of like-minded people. They in turn can provide stimulating questions, ideas, and points of view that will inspire fresh thoughts from you. You wind up creating an idea factory that keeps generating more terrific share-worthy content with a lot less time and effort.

5. Focus on helping others.
The idea of “pay it forward,” give-to-get (G2G), “karma” if you like, works well in the social world. Share the ideas and work of people you regard highly and they’ll take a look at what you’re doing. Helping others doesn’t take a lot of effort, but over time, people will start to see you as another authority.

If you follow these tips, you can become an active social media contributor without spending a ton of your life online. Why not get started now. Here’s to your success in social media as you keep putting together your best year ever…. Enjoy a great month!