Recently I found this interesting e-mail in my inbox. The subject line (It only takes 10 minutes to have success in social media) really intrigued me as I often hear about these 10 minutes a day plans…heck…I even gave an example of my own of how I thought you could manage social media for your business in 20 minutes. It is possible to do this if you’re very focused and don’t allow yourself to get distracted. But when I read the plan suggested by this leading app developer, I was unpleasantly surprised. Here’s what I read:
“Focus on how to be social, not on how to do social”- Jay Baer
Monitoring your Social Media presence is incredibly important – but many business owners and marketers are concerned that it will take too much time.
Here are 5 steps that you can do over a cup of coffee and social media will become a healthy daily inbound marketing routine in just 10 minutes:
- Check Facebook stats (1 minute): Visit your company’s Facebook page and check out wall posts, new discussions and insights. You should also track number of likes per day using insights.
- Check Twitter for chatter about your company (2 minutes): Use tools like TweetDeck or, Hootsuite (aff.) to monitor conversations about your company in real-time.
- Scan Google Alerts (1.5 minutes): Check Google alerts for your company name and products (as well as those of your competitors). To set up this enter your search items in a Google Alerts and select to received updates as they happen.
- Check your LinkedIn profile (3 minutes): Search for questions on LinkedIn that you or members of your company can answer. When you find a relevant question, respond and include a link to your website or, a relevant blog post.
- Use Google Reader to check latest updates (2.5 minutes): Set up reader for blogs of industry leaders, social media evangelists and relevant keyword search results.
Make sure you monitor, engage, and measure your social media presence each day, and remember it only takes 10 minutes to be successful.
Don’t get me wrong. These are great tips. Every business should be checking all of these things (whether you use Google Reader or something else is debatable, but you should be keeping up on industry blogs). This company seems to have missed their own point, however. Where’s the focus on “being social?” Only ONE of their five steps actually mentions “being social” (#4 indicates that you should engage in answering questions on LinkedIn).
Checking your posts, analytics, google alerts and industry blogs are all very useful, but they are not “engaging” in social media. If all you do is focus on these things for 10 minutes each day your social media strategy will be the next epic fail. Maybe I’m missing something. Maybe they’re targeting much larger companies with Chief Marketing Officers who don’t have to do the engagement side of things and just look at the numbers? I’m not sure.
If you’ve only got 10 minutes to do your social media each morning while you’re drinking your coffee, here’s a better plan for your time:
- Check your Facebook Timeline for questions, comments and posts and respond to any new ones. E-mail anyone else who needs to get involved in remediating any complaints, or to congratulate them on handling things well. Once a week take an extra minute or two on Facebook to check out your insights and see what is working well for your business.
- Check out your Twitter Feed. Again, respond to any retweets, @mentions, @replies or mentions of your company. To do this quickly, I agree you need to use a dashboard like Hootsuite. Before you take off, engage in a conversation with one or two people you are following. Ask them a question about something they’ve posted, congratulate them on something, agree, disagree, commiserate…whatever…just talk to people! Now, tell your followers something interesting about your business/products.
- Check out your LinkedIn feed. Accept new invitations. Check your favourite groups to see if there are any new discussions to check out. If there are, post your thoughts and join the conversation. If there are not, maybe now is the time to check out the LinkedIn Answers forum to see if you can help someone.
In all honesty, that will probably take your whole 10 minutes–or more depending on what kinds of discussions you get into. If you have more time, now you have the chance to check your analytics and blog list. Don’t forget to comment on blog posts when you have something to say. It’s good for both your reputation and your SEO.
So, yes you can have success in social media in just 10 minutes a day, but you need to make sure you’re doing the things that are going to have the most immediate impact if you have limited time.
Anita, great article! When I read that first list up there, my thought was, “But that’s only checking!” Where does the engaging come in? It’s hard to do much in 10 minutes, and that doesn’t even include developing your own content to share.