Social Media Monitoring in Less Than 20 Mins Per Day

  

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 Social Media Monitoring in 16 Mins

So you have finally decided to jump into the social media waters and now you are overwhelmed with the shear volume and pace to which this new world revolves? This article will help you formulate a plan to monitor your social media accounts and streamline your strategy in less than 20 minutes per day.

We all have limited time in our work days and our bandwidth seems to be at maximum capacity so buckle your seat belts and get your RSS and Alerts ready, but can you really monitor all of your accounts in 20 mins?

1.  Decide what you should monitor

Not all of your social accounts are as fruitful as others. We see many clients that are on every social media channel possible, but they are doing a poor job of being active on all of them. Choose your top 3-4 platforms that make sense for your business to get started and focus on these only.

Since most businesses are familiar with Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn (Questions) this is a good place to start the evaluation, but the platform must be right for your business. If you are a photographer or a wedding planner you might be better served ditching LinkedIn and adding Pinterest if your primary business is B2C.

2.  Set a Schedule

The last thing that a business owner or a solo marketing manager should be doing is to have notifications set up to their smart phone.  The constant disruption becomes vary distracting and can take you away from your day to day.  Set a schedule so you have allocated time (5 mins per day) to check your social channels.  We like to do this first thing in the morning before anyone gets to the office.

If you are monitoring 3-4 channels this shouldn't be too difficult once you get accustom to it. If you recieve notifications all day long and you are like us you will be constantly logging into your accounts to reply which takes time.  We aren't saying to ingnore these reports.  Replies come next.

3.  Social Monitoring Apps

There is no way that you will be able to monitor your accounts in 20 minutes or less per day without some help.  You will need to call on platforms like Sprout Social, HootSuite, or TweetDeck for some help with this.  There are a handful of these apps available for free and with subscriptions. 

These three apps do a very good job of monitoring 3-5 platforms for free.  If you have more accounts or want more depth in your monitoring you will require a paid version or a more robust platform like Radian6.

We use Hootsuite Pro for because we can have unlimited social profiles, it is very easy to use, has a robust feature set, and integrates with HubSpot.  You an also have unlimited RSS Feeds with Hootsuite so you have virtually all of your monitoring in one spot.

4.  Bulk Replies via Twitter 

Twitter can be downright overwhelming as your follower base grows and your Home Feed gets cluttered.  The first thing you need to do is Create Lists so you segment your followers to track their interactions easier.  Remember time is of the essence, so if you are getting 10-30 ReTweets per day and you want to thank everyone then reply in bulk.  Thank 3-5 people at a time to cut down on the volume of Tweets you must send and try to engage based on topic. 

If you have multiple replies or mentions based off a blog article then engage more than one follower at a time if possible.  Try and limit your replies to your main influencer's and to topics that are relevant about your company, industry, customer support, or complaints and point them to the person they need to contact.

5. RSS Feeds / Readers

Most people use an RSS Feed to subscribe to blogs, but you can also use an RSS Reader for more. With an RSS Reader you can send anything that has an RSS to your Google Reader and monitor it from here. Google Reader will allow you consolidate all of your feeds and integrates with some social media monitoring tools like Hootsuite to streamline the process even more.

20 Minutes Per Day Schedule

You will notice that we have left you a 4 minute buffer.  Once you get comfortable with your new social media monitoring plan you should be able to get this done is 16 minutes which leaves you 4 minutes to either add additional platforms or to start replying to the comments and blogs you are monitoring. 

This may seem impossible today, but so did a lot of things in life before you learned the technique. Stick to your plan even if it takes longer than 20 minutes in the short-term.  

 
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