Is social media eating up your day?

I’m the first to tout social media as one of the best forms of online marketing, whether it’s to promote your product, your brand, yourself or even an event – It’s a great way to add a personal touch to marketing and at a rather low cost too.

But if you have gotten to the stage where social media is starting to eat up far too much of your day and you are finding yourself consistently time poor, I think it’s time you took a step up to look at the bigger picture.

I have a few tips to help you get back on track!

Reevaluate your goals

Before you do anything, you need to evaluate what your goals actually are. Is it to build new relationships? Nurture old ones? Increase your brand exposure or to grow as an individual? Unless you know what your goals are, it’s hard to know if you are meeting them.

Measure your success / failure

If your social media goals are to acquire new customers, keep a list of where your new customers are actually coming from. This will allow you to see what is working and what is wasting your time.

If your goal is to build relationships, this is a bit harder to measure. Do you feel your chosen channel is allowing you to learn / grow your relationship? Or are you struggling to make a connection?

Set aside time

Constantly checking in to social media throughout the day is the number one killer – Sure, your intentions might be good, to just log in for a few minutes to check updates, but before you know, 15 minutes has gone by. Sure, this doesn’t sound like much but if you do this 5 times a day, thats almost 1.5 hours that you’ve lost in relatively unproductive time.

Set aside an hour or two a day, know what you want to achieve and spend your time constructively achieving it.

Don’t follow the crowd

Just because everyone you know is on a chosen media, it doesn’t mean you have to be! If you have evaluated it’s effectiveness and it doesn’t fit in with your goals, just let it go. No one is going to think any less of you and there are plenty of ways to keep in touch! (Note: Don’t just “Not log into your profile” either disable or delete it.)

Prioritise

Sure, social media is probably the least strenuous task on your to do list (perhaps even enjoyable) but that doesn’t mean it should have priority.  Don’t let social media get in the way of the important tasks you need to address!