13 Tips to Maximize Your Social Media Productivity

It’s pretty common knowledge that implementing an effective social media strategy takes time. That makes tips on how to maximize your social media productivity, such as those shared by Todd Schnick, co-founder of #Innochat, on his strategy for allocating your time very valuable. Todd’s recommendation was to divide your social media participation time into thirds, with 1/3 of your time within each category:

• Observing / listening in others’ social media outlets
• Participating in others’ outlets through commenting, guest blogging, etc.
• Creating content and being active within your own outlets

Ever since Todd shared that concept in early 2009, his social media productivity strategy has been front and center in my mind (and ensconced in my social media strategy presentations). The truth is I rarely come close to this balanced approach since creating Brainzooming content definitely represents the majority of my time.

One way of improving your time allocation though is by investing your effort in activities which contribute to more than one of these categories. The following list includes some of the multi-category approaches I have tried.

13 strategies to maximize your social media time efficiency

1. Use tweets with your original content as input to create a blog post. For example, this blog post on 5 personal strategies started as a series of individual tweets.
2. Comment on another blog and use the comment as the basis for an original post on your blog.
3. Do a post comprised of comments (or links) other people have shared on Twitter you’ve found valuable.
4. Incorporate Twitter-based responses you’ve received from others on your content / ideas / tweets into a blog post.
5. Write a post inviting guest posts for your blog, then tweet links to your invitation post to solicit guest bloggers.
6. When you come across someone interested in topics related to your blog, ask them to do a guest blog post (and refer them back to the post in #5).
7. If you write a guest post for another site, do a complementary post on your blog pointing your followers to it.
8. Participate in Twitter-based chats on topics of interest (#TChat – Tues at 8 pm ET, #Innochat – Thu at 12 noon ET, #Ideachat – Monthly, 2nd Saturday at 9 am ET) and use your comments during the chat as the basis for a blog post.
9. Create your own Twitter chat linked to your blog topic to benefit your audience.
10. Use answers you’ve created for LinkedIn Q&A or other discussion groups as starters for blog posts.
11. Write a response article to a blog post you’ve come across via Twitter, RSS feeds, etc.
12. Use what people on Facebook, Twitter, or other networks are talking about as the inspiration for a post. Be sure to include links to the original conversation, including letting the people you’re referencing know about it so they can promote it within their networks.
13. Answers to reader questions can be reformatted into blog posts. This post was originally an email response to a reader’s question about how to strengthen his social media participation without taking too much time from necessary business development activities!

What are you doing to maximize your social media productivity?

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Mike Brown is an award-winning innovator in strategy, communications, and experience marketing. He authors the Brainzooming^TM blog, and serves as the company’s chief Catalyst. He wrote the ebook “Taking the NO Out of InNOvation” and is a frequent keynote presenter.