How To Manage Your Social Media In Ten Minutes (Or Less) Each Day

As a social media consultant I work with clients strategically to help them develop a marketing plan which is aligned to their business objectives. I will set up social media accounts for them or optimise the accounts they already have. I will provide them with a social media playbook which includes guidelines, branded templates, content calendars and everything else they may need to keep their social media marketing on track. And then my job is done. I say goodbye and move on to the next client.

Except I never really say goodbye.

I keep an eye on their progress from a distance, I share their content to my own feeds and I am always a phone call or an e-mail away when they need my help again. I really care about my clients and it makes me sad when I see all the effort they initially put into setting up their social accounts fizzle out. As they post less and less I watch as their social media activity dwindles away bit by bit. When I ask why, they often tell me they simply don't have the time to maintain an active presence and hiring someone to do their social media marketing full-time is beyond their budget right now. So for those clients I have devised a 10-Minute-A-Day Social Media Plan to deal with their overwhelm. I'd like to share an outline of the plan with you today as you might find it helpful too.

Can you really manage social media in just 10 minutes (or less) a day?

The answer is yes, but before you put the plan into action, it's really important that you do some work upfront. Don't be tempted to put the plan into place without first doing the following tasks.

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1. Clarify Your Social Media Goals

You won't see any success with this plan without first spending time figuring out why you are using social media in the first place. Make sure you are crystal clear on your social media marketing goals. Clear goals will not only propel your strategy forward, but they will also serve as defined metrics when it comes to measuring your progress. Without clearly defined goals, you'll continue to wander aimlessly in the social media landscape. Without a map or destination to guide you, you will quickly become lost.

Insider Tip: Identifying your marketing goals is just the first step in creating a social media strategy. To find out about the other steps check out my 10 Questions to Answer for Social Media Success.

2. Audit Your Social Media Activity

Next, take some time to audit your current social media activity. An audit will help you identify which platforms and content are working best for you. You can then focus your time more productively on those channels and drop the platforms that aren't working so well for you. That's an instant time-saver right away.

Insider Tip: Download My Free eGuide To Conducting Your Social Media Audit

3. Create a Social Media Calendar

Create a social media calendar and populate it with updates you can share over the coming days, weeks, and months. Map out monthly themes which could include seasonal activity, industry events, holidays, etc. Each morning, you can grab pre-written posts from your calendar and plug them into a scheduling tool.

4. Build A Tweet Bank

A Tweet Bank is simply a collection of boilerplate tweets that you can pull out and adapt when you need to. Of course it doesn’t have to be limited to Twitter —you can easily expand it to create sample posts for Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc.

5. Create Twitter Lists

Twitter Lists are one of the most effective and simple ways to get a handle on your Twitter engagement. Each time you follow someone new on Twitter, get into the habit of adding them straight to one of your lists. If you haven’t already started with your lists, start building them today.

Insider Tip: Follow my step-by-step guide to find out how to build your first Twitter list.

6. Set Up A Content Curation Hub

Creating your own content is an undeniably important way to establish online credibility, but it's time consuming. Aim to create one piece of good original content a month, and supplement this with daily content curation. Curation can deliver many benefits including establishing thought leadership, increasing visibility and driving social shares.

I use Scoop.it to both find and curate content. I also use Feedly and FlipBoard for content curation. Setting these tools up in advance takes very little time and once they are done you have a quick easy source of news to draw from every day.

Insider Tip: Other tools worth checking out include My Tweeted Times and Nuzzel which connect automatically with Twitter to give you daily updates of top news from people you follow.

7. Automate Activity With IFTTT

Automation is the process of setting up systems to work whether you’re around or not. Not everyone is a fan of automating social media activity, but used well, it is a boon to time-pressed social media markers.. The key to making it work is to spend time creating genuine, engaging content, and then maximising its performance through strategic use of automation tools.

A tool like IFTTT (an acronym for If This, Then That) allows you to sync up multiple apps so that when a certain activity happens, it kicks off a separate activity in another app. I use IFTTT to add my tweets to a Google Spreadsheet to create a Twitter Bank of tweets to draw on.

For more automation tools check out this list from Sprout Social.

8. Connect Your Social Accounts To SumAll For Quick Reports

An essential element of social media marketing is measuring progress. A tool like SumAll allows you to connect your social networks so it can quickly pull data and insights from those accounts. It will then send you a daily and/or weekly digest of your audience size, engagement, reach, and post activity. Best of all the tool is free to use.

NB: You will need to set aside at least one half-day or ideally one full day to focus on these exercises but it will be time well spent. By doing this your 10-Minute-A-Day Social Media Plan will be more effective in the long run. You should also aim to block out one day a month to plan for the month ahead, review what's working for you and create more content to fill your editorial calendar.

So now for The 10-Minute-A-Day Social Media Plan

The Plan starts by blocking time on your calendar at the start of each morning. If you schedule this first thing you will be able to move on with your day knowing you have taken care of your social media marketing. Scheduling those ten minutes on your calendar makes it a habit and good social media management starts by developing good habits and prioritising activity.

Step 1

From your social media calendar you will see at a glance if you have mapped out a theme for the week and you can then pull corresponding updates from your calendar and your Tweet Bank. Check your Feedly account (or whichever content curation hub you have set up) and choose one or two articles to share. Don't forget to add your own perspective to personalise it. Use an automated scheduling tool like HootSuite, Buffer or Tweetdeck to schedule those updates for the day.

Step 2

Next go into into your Twitter Lists and focus on one List each day. Pick a tweet to comment on, favourite, or share on your own timeline. Take a quick look at trending hashtags with tools like Twitonomy, Hashtagify.me and RiteTag to see if you can add your perspective to the conversation.

Step 3

Create a quick graphic to accompany your social media updates using an easy-peasy tool like Pablo, Adobe Spark or Canva. These graphic creation tools are so quick and easy - you'll be amazed at what you can do in a couple of minutes with them. To save more time, create pre-made branded templates upfront and then just drag and drop your images into these templates.

Step 4

It's important to schedule time each day to grow and nurture your online community, by responding to comments, acknowledging new followers and thanking those who have shared your posts. You might also take your conversations a step further by reaching out through direct messaging. A word of caution here. Please don't be tempted to save time by automating your engagement. Social media is just that…social. If you have an automated message set to deliver a canned direct message when someone new follows you, then unset it. If you want to reach out to a new follower, be sincere about it.

Insider Tip: A tool like Commun.it is super-helpful to manage your online interactions in just a few minutes a day. You can keep track of your new followers, quickly identify your most engaged followers and respond to them directly from within the Commun.it platform.

Step 5

To use social media in a strategic and focused way, you will need to monitor what is being said about you online. You can do this simply by creating a Google Alert to monitor your name, your company name, and any other relevant industry keywords. It takes less than a minute to set it up and to use it to check for mentions each day.

Step 6

Finally, if you have some time to spare, check your SumAll daily report to see your progress over the past 24 hours.

And now you're done for the day!

The Key To Successful Social Media Management

The 10-Minute-A-Day Social Media Plan is by no means a strategic plan. Rather it's a tactical plan to get a handle on social media when you feel overwhelmed and pressed for time. Following the plan ensures that social media becomes a daily habit. You won't get everything done in ten minutes, but that's OK. The important thing is that you will get something done and that adds up each week. Before you know it you will be able to look back at the end of a month and see how much you have scaled your activity just by spending ten minutes a day doing one or two things. You will then be well on your way to mastering social media overwhelm. In the immortal words of Zig Ziglar -

You Don’t Have To Be Great To Start But You Have To Start To Be Great!

Do you suffer from social media overwhelm? What tips have you found helpful? Please share it with us in the comments below.