A Guide to Effective Time Management on Social Media

** Updated as of April 2016**

Having a social media strategy in place is not just beneficial to the success of your construction business, it is now a necessary tool to grow a distinctive online presence and in turn be seen as a reputable building product manufacturer.

And as social media continues to grow and expand year on year, you can’t afford to be left behind. New stats  show that the number of worldwide social media users is expected to reach 2.5 billion by 2018.

However as with any marketing activity, it still takes time and effort to see results. Successfully managing a company’s social media presence requires daily activity to interact with brand communities and to share content that builds thought leadership.

There are some ways of efficiently organising time spent on social networks to ensure that the benefits of social media outweigh the time and effort put in…

• Use the right social networks: Find out where your customers and prospects are spending their online time and make sure that you are accessible to them at all times. Due to the large number of social platforms available, focus your marketing efforts on the most appropriate ones for your business. You may want to take a look at what platforms the Top UK Contractors are using here.

• Have a plan: Having a strategy with defined objectives will help you prioritise your time on social media sites. It is easy to get distracted by the wealth of conversations but remember you can’t be everywhere all the time. Set aside how much time you want to spend each day marketing your business and stick to it. This ensures that time is used productively and is working towards achieving the goals and objectives set out in your strategy.

• Spend time on ‘creation’ and ‘maintenance’: This can be in different forms such as responding to direct messages or posting your own, starting a discussion on Twitter or sharing relevant information. The best way to interact with consumers on a daily basis is to keep them interested. This can be done by posting visual updates in the form of images or short video clips, re-tweeting useful content to your followers, creating new groups and communities, posting questions or  updating your audience with your latest blog content.

• Track your efforts: It is relatively difficult to accurately track marketing statistics on social networking. However, you can monitor the responses you receive from consumers when they re-tweet your posts, share your links and videos, or comment on a blog or status. This all contributes towards brand awareness and favourability, which could lead to new business for your company. Use tools such as Moz Analytics to monitor your social activity and analyse which type of content is working best.

Time Management Schedule

There is no template illustrating the exact time that should be spent on social media marketing activities throughout the day. This will typically vary depending upon the size of your company and the amount of internal resource available.

However, below is a rough guide to highlight the basic social media activities that should take place on a daily, weekly and monthly basis. These can be amended and altered according to specific company needs.

DAILY TASKS (Dedicate 50-60 minutes per day):

• In the morning spend 10 minutes sending out new tweets, respond to tweets or re-tweet interesting and informative links. You can also use tools such as Hootsuite and Buffer to schedule a few tweets when necessary.

• In the afternoon spend 30 minutes replying to comments and then commenting on other blogs, wall posts or direct messages which may have been received earlier.

• Spend a few minutes updating your social media pages, starting a new group discussion and/or uploading a piece of content that would interest your followers.

• Throughout the day, find out what people are talking about on the web and engage with them. Do this by creating a new stream or time line in Twitter and then set it to track particular keywords or hashtags. Share some of this content on your accounts. Creating Twitter lists is also an efficient way to keep up to date by categorising the type of information published.

• At the end of the day ensure you’ve scheduled interesting blog content to share, either your own or external sources, to keep your audience engaged even after office hours.

** TIP ** Followerwonk allows you to monitor when your followers are most active online; use this to align your posts and updates with audience behaviour on a day to day basis for maximum engagement. 

WEEKLY TASKS  (Dedicate approx 2-3 hours):

• Stay relevant by scheduling and writing a new blog post every week, allowing bloggers to interact with you and thereby help promote your blog and keep your content fresh and up to date. Ensure the blog content you are publishing is outlined in a carefully implemented content strategy in line with your business objectives.

• Check mentions of your company/brand with Google Alerts and respond as appropriate. This shows that you are interested in communicating with them, especially if they have experienced a problem or have a query that you can assist them with.

• Check LinkedIn and other networking sites to research potential new groups and monitor existing group discussions. If appropriate, participate and use this as an additional promotional tool.

• Check Social media statistics using tools such as Moz Analytics to analyse what activities have been successful and which could be improved upon.

• Upload viral videos to Youtube or images to Pinterest to show events you’ve attended or to demonstrate company culture.

MONTHLY TASKS (Dedicate 2-3 hours):

• Create new Twitter lists and update old ones.

• Monitor LinkedIn groups, Facebook pages and forums to take part in appropriate discussions; select which ones to join and leave unpopular/irrelevant ones.

• Find new people to follow and connect with on Twitter, Google +, LinkedIn and any other platforms relevant to your business.

• Ask previously satisfied customers to write company/brand recommendations to increase prospects’ confidence.

• Produce and distribute new videos and photos. Send them out to opinion leaders and people with a large following who can help with distribution.

• On a monthly basis you should be checking your website and blog performance by creating a measurable website activity report. This should include social media progress to see which platforms are having an impact on website traffic or brand awareness. Read this post by the Daily Egg for further information on how to use Google Analytics to track social activity.

Although this schedule is only a rough guide, it illustrates the importance of  time management to avoid wasting time and effort  on unproductive activities which do not help with achieving your objectives and goals.

So how do you manage your time and productivity?

Look out for our New and Updated Social Media E-book in the next week, covering a range of information on each social media platform for Construction Marketers.

In the mean time have a read of our post on ‘7 Easy Ways to Improve Your Social Media Profile‘, or leave a comment below – we’d love to hear from you 🙂