Thursday 14 April 2011

How much time I spend on social media and how I organise them

From Wordle-images

I've been using social media in relation to business and pleasure for a couple of years now. Today, I found myself writing a letter to an artist friend about how my use of social media had evolved and thought - this is relevant to a wider audience! So here it is:

"Dear ...

...
You were talking about trying to find the time for your blog. I thought you might be interested from a business perspective about the time and effort I spend on different social media. The way I organise them and my time spent is as follows:

  • Twitter: good for quick comments, takes 1 minute to make comment.
  • Twitpic: allows you to link a photo to a quick tweet.
  • Facebook: About 5 mins for a longer wall post. Best to have a separate FB page for business
  • Blog: Couple of paragraphs - including links and photos. Up to an hour - a lot of that thinking, composition and correction time.
  • Picasa Web Albums. Any decent or relevant pictures are uploaded to a web album. This also allows me to incorporate single images or slideshows into the blog.
  • YouTube: A couple of hours - several takes of video, editing, uploading. (You can do it quicker!). Again, YouTube videos can be incorporated into Blog articles
  • Website: If fully structured, takes 1h plus for new entry. Faster alternative is to use blog as website and ensure you have good search and indexing function (blogger and wordpress provide these).
  • Daily time spent on Social media - some time daily (up to an hour!). 
  • Remember the key word is Social - you need to interact with others, not just talk about yourself all the time.

Optimising your entries for maximum effect:
  • My twitter entries are linked to Facebook, so appear there too automatically.
  • By adding an additional tag, I can also direct tweets to Linkedin if serious enough.
  • Once I write a blog article or make a YouTube video, I tweet a link to it (which also appears on FB and LinkedIn if appropriate).
  • I use the name miltoncontact as the common link throughout as there are too many Chris Thomas's out there!
The idea is to have a virtuous circle linking your different media.
All this ensures that you can be found on the web by a whole range of different routes.

My possible weakness is that I tend to have a wide range of topics and interests all represented in these different media. More focussed businesses have dedicated blogs and other social media accounts for each different specific business stream.

My excuse is that I'm a generalist with wide interests and am happy to be seen as such. :-)

This is actually a letter relevant to many others so I will also blog it! Which reminds me of a very useful piece of advice to generate content:

If anyone asks you a question or you have a conversation and you think the answer is of general interest, share it, it is an effective way to generate new content

Best wishes,

Chris"

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