Time Management Tips For Business
If you have a Twitter account for business purposes, that means that you are taking time away from work to be on Twitter.
Twitter can drive an amazing amount of business and traffic your way, it can be well worth the work.
Still, because you are doing this for work, you need to manage your time wisely.If you have multiple accounts, one of the biggest time-savers out there - and it’s free! - are sites such as www.hello.txt or www.ping.fm, which allows you to simultaneously update all of your social networking sites. You just enter your 140-character update in the text box on either site, click a button, and the update has been posted on as many as 20 or 30 sites,
Seven Steps To Twitter Time Managment
1. Twice Daily Plan
It is very important to update your social networking sites at least a couple of times a day during the week, but this doesn’t have to take a long time.
2. Make a Communications Schedule
The easiest thing to do is to have a weekly schedule of information that you want to send out on your social networking sites. It could be a link to a blog post, it could be a contest that you’re announcing, it could be coupons that you are giving out, it could be the “word of the day” that people can use if they come in to your store and they’ll get a free item.
3. Start With Your Personal Direct Messages (DM) and @Replies
Weekly example: On Monday morning, start out by checking your personal direct messages and your replies. Reply if necessary. A personal direct message is not the same as an automated direct response. Auto Direct Responses (not personal) tend to include the word “follow.”
4. Business Topic Tweet
Send your first “business tweet” of the day using a tool such as hello.txt or ping.fm.
5. Conversational Topic Tweets: (Talk AND Listen)
Next, do a couple of conversational tweets - comment on what someone else said, ask a question, talk about your day. You’re on Twitter to network and interact, and you can’t do that by ONLY blasting out links about your business.
6. Multi-task Your Social Media
If you have other social networking sites, like Linkedin or Facebook or whatever site you prefer, go repeat the process over there - check messages, reply, then post your business tweet, and post a conversational update or two.
Guess what? That whole process shouldn’t have taken you more than ten or fifteen minutes once you learn your Twitter basics and discipline yourself to make your weekly Social Media Communications Schedule. Your learning curve will require more time in the beginning. The
However, many people who are following you on Twitter are NOT going to have seen just that one tweet - unless they were on Twitter right at that moment. So you need to repeat the process again once in the afternoon, and once again in the evening, for maximum exposure. Two is your minimum.
And that is all the time that you need to spend on social networking sites. This takes you a maximum of 45 minutes per day.
Contact: Margaret Ross is president and CEO of the Kamaron Institute, a leading business management consulting, marketing research, and staff development firm.
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Margaret Ross: Kamaron Institute on Twitter: http://twitter.com/kamaron_org
