Time to Get Organized with your Social Media Marketing

**ZekeLL** · 09-04-2009 12:50 PM

Should is a hard word to stomach. Often we’ll tell ourselves “I should do that… “ or “That should be on my to do list.” When it comes to Social Media Marketing, the shoulds are overwhelming. You should be on Facebook. If you’re on Facebook, you should be on Twitter. If you’re on Twitter, you should be posting on Twitter. What, you haven’t set up a Digg.com account? Well, you should…

Most of us get so overwhelmed, that we choose to do nothing. Seems like a bad solution. Let’s take a different approach to Social Media Marketing. I promise there’s not a should in the bunch.

Use the 80/20 Rule to Cut Through the Crap
The 80/20 rule teaches us that 80% of results stem from 20% of our actions. Whenever we talk about Social Media Marketing, the 80/20 rule always comes up. Why? Because so many of the options for in social media are a waste of time.

The 20% (Business Builders)

• Finding great forums to post work

• Writing quality articles about your subject

• Researching great tools to automate your submissions (hint, we discuss them a lot in this blog)

• Guest blogging on great sites

The 80% (Time Wasters)

• Following people on twitter to boost your numbers

• Collecting endless Facebook friends

• Getting caught up in angry battles with forum trolls

• Spending hours looking at Digg.com articles and responding to silly comments

Getting Things Done
GTD is an amazing book by David Allen. If you haven’t read it yet, you’re losing ground to people who have. If you haven’t read it in a while, consider picking it up. There’s always a gem or two that you’ve missed.

The heart of GTD is:

1. Get all of the stuff out of your head and into a list.

2. Decide what the next action is on each item

3. Batch items to make them more efficient (i.e. Make all your phone calls at once, set a time to respond to email, etc.)

4. Once a week, reevaluate your list to make decisions about what’s important and what can be dropped.

Let’s point this thinking towards Social Media Marketing

1. Make a list of everything you’d like to do. Get it out of your head and onto paper.

2. Go through the list and decide if the task is an 80 or a 20. Take a big black marker and cross through the 80’s until you’re down to a handful of tasks that will really make an impact.

3. Now batch these tasks.

Batching Social Media Tasks
A great way to batch social media tasks is with Firefox. Open all of the tabs for a given task and use Firefox to save the set of tabs into a single bookmark (Bookmarks -> Bookmark all Tabs). We use this for a couple of sets:

• Forums: Save all of the common forums you’ve found into a single tab. Then go through and systematically post your article as a new topic in each forum

• Responses: Open all of your social pages and respond to comments in a single sitting.

• Idea Generation: Save your favorite idea generating blogs. Now, when it’s time to write articles, you can scan the headlines and gather ideas all at once.

We batch lots of things to save time and energy. One you’ve learned the idea of batching, you’ll find all sorts of ways to make it work for you.

If it’s worth doing, it’s Worth Re-Evaluating
Just because you’ve been doing something for months, doesn’t mean it’s the best use of your time. Quickly you’ll realize that some things you do generate more buzz, leads, and business than others. It’s useful to schedule a formal time each month to think through all of the things you’ve done and decide what’s working and what’s not. We try to block out time at the end of every month to make sure what we’re doing works.

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