A question that I get on a fairly regular basis is "how do you do it all?", and while I did address this question back in July, my business has changed so much since then, that I feel like I need to address it again.
My stationery and design work have nearly doubled since July, and I think a lot of the increase has to do with the amount of effort that I put into my own business. Effort, though, doesn't need to mean "hard". There are a lot of easy things that I have been doing in order to minimize my time in front of the computer during week nights, and still make it seem as if I'm spending a ton of time on everything. Since I work full-time during the day, I simply cannot spend hours every day worrying about social media, blogging etc, so instead, I have found a way to grow my business through social media, while minimizing the time I spend doing so.
So here is how I use social media to my advantage:
There are two BIG tools that I cannot live without right now - Blogger and HootSuite. I typically spend Saturday and/or Sunday mornings writing my blog posts for the whole week. I then use Blogger to schedule those posts in advance, copy the permalinks and head on over to Hootsuite to schedule tweets for when that post goes live. By using scheduling, permalinks and Hootsuite, my blog views have nearly doubled in the past three months. I'm sure the improved passion and content behind my posts has contributed as well, but I'd like to give a lot of credit to my new scheduling system. It takes me between 2-3 hours to write my weekly posts and schedule them.
I also know that sending one tweet a day is really not going to help me hit my target audience. So, again, I use Hootsuite to schedule between 10-15 tweets a day, and I have my Facebook page linked to Twitter, which means that those same posts are getting out to my Facebook page all in one shot. My scheduled tweets highlight recent products, blog posts, popular items, and other business things I want to share. I also make sure to send a lot of tweets that aren't product links and blog posts, because it's so important to use social media to connect with my followers as a human being and person. Since I want to feel "human" about my tweets, I schedule them the night before or morning of. By scheduling the important posts and topics, when I check twitter throughout the day, I don't have to worry about coming up with content, instead, I can just spend my short amount of time responding to interactions and keeping up with the activity that my scheduled posts have created. Since scheduling my tweets, managing interactions carefully, and being as active as possible, I have gained over 50 followers in just a few weeks! It takes me about a twenty minutes to a half hour to schedule all of my tweets for the day.
Speaking of linking Facebook and Twitter - while I do like having the convenience of linking the two, I plan on unlinking in the future, and using only Hootsuite (or the FB post scheduler) to post important updates. I'm not sure if this will impact my business or online interactions in any way, but I sure will be finding out soon enough.
So there you have it - how I have been using social media as efficiently as possible! How do you all use social media? Any tools or tips that I should know about??
