Time saving tips for social networking

I recently wrote about how much time the average consumer spends on social networking.  If you read that blog you know that , in the U.S., it is an astonishing 6 hours per day.

As a small business owner, you probably know that you need to have a social media campaign and that you need to attend to your social networking sites on a daily basis.  But, if you are like most people running a business, it can be difficult to find the time to effectively manage your social media campaign.

One question we get all of the time is, how many hours per day should be spent on managing a social media campaign.  There are many opinions about this and, of course, it depends on many factors including the campaign goals, number of social media channels being used, and how well organized the campaign was set up in the beginning.  The good news is, in our opinion, that you don't need to spend 6 hours per day.  Our experience indicates that a social media campaign, once properly set up, can be effectively managed with 5 - 10 hours per week.  This would be the average for a basic campaign that includes 3 - 5 channels such as Twitter, Facebook, Blog, YouTube and LinkedIn.

There are a number of time saving tools to help you manage your social networking sites. Below is a brief summary of several these tools.

Hootsuite - Allows you to create one message and post to multiple sites.  Includes the ability to schedule posts for future dates.  Handy for monitoring activity on multiple sites.  We love this tool and couldn't live without it.

FriendFeed -This site allows a specific group of people to share anything from photos and links. It also features the ability to pull in updates from other websites.  You can use this tool to publish your feed to other social networking sites.

mysocial247 - This is a column that runs alongside the Firefox browser.  It allows users to manage all of their social networking sites, including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube etc. in one place

TweetDeck - This site provides statistics and local trends. It features the ability to schedule posts in advance.

These are just a few of the tools out there.  Let us know if you've found one that you really like.

If you'd like to find out more about these tools and other services for managing your social media campaign, get in touch with us at www.OrgainikSEO.com