Tweet

Time to Get Organized with your Social Media Marketing

Guest post by: Zeke Camusio

Article Overview: Take charge of your social media marketing by organizing yourself and your work. Use Getting Things Done principles to manage workflow and 80/20 thinking to cut out the useless activity.

Time to Get Organized with your Social Media Marketing

Should is a hard word to stomach. Often we’ll tell ourselves “I should do that… “ or “That should be on my to do list.” When it comes to Social Media Marketing, the shoulds are overwhelming. You should be on Facebook. If you’re on Facebook, you should be on Twitter. If you’re on Twitter, you should be posting on Twitter. What, you haven’t set up a Digg.com account? Well, you should…

Most of us get so overwhelmed, that we choose to do nothing. Seems like a bad solution. Let’s take a different approach to Social Media Marketing. I promise there’s not a should in the bunch.



Use the 80/20 Rule to Cut Through the Crap

The 80/20 rule teaches us that 80% of results stem from 20% of our actions. Whenever we talk about Social Media Marketing, the 80/20 rule always comes up. Why? Because so many of the options for in social media are a waste of time.

The 20% (Business Builders)

• Finding great forums to post work

• Writing quality articles about your subject

• Researching great tools to automate your submissions (hint, we discuss them a lot in this blog)

• Guest blogging on great sites

The 80% (Time Wasters)

• Following people on twitter to boost your numbers

• Collecting endless Facebook friends

• Getting caught up in angry battles with forum trolls

• Spending hours looking at Digg.com articles and responding to silly comments

Getting Things Done

GTD is an amazing book by David Allen. If you haven’t read it yet, you’re losing ground to people who have. If you haven’t read it in a while, consider picking it up. There’s always a gem or two that you’ve missed.

The heart of GTD is:

1. Get all of the stuff out of your head and into a list.

2. Decide what the next action is on each item

3. Batch items to make them more efficient (i.e. Make all your phone calls at once, set a time to respond to email, etc.)

4. Once a week, reevaluate your list to make decisions about what’s important and what can be dropped.



Let’s point this thinking towards Social Media Marketing

1. Make a list of everything you’d like to do. Get it out of your head and onto paper.

2. Go through the list and decide if the task is an 80 or a 20. Take a big black marker and cross through the 80’s until you’re down to a handful of tasks that will really make an impact.

3. Now batch these tasks.

Batching Social Media Tasks

A great way to batch social media tasks is with Firefox. Open all of the tabs for a given task and use Firefox to save the set of tabs into a single bookmark (Bookmarks -> Bookmark all Tabs). We use this for a couple of sets:

• Forums: Save all of the common forums you’ve found into a single tab. Then go through and systematically post your article as a new topic in each forum

• Responses: Open all of your social pages and respond to comments in a single sitting.

• Idea Generation: Save your favorite idea generating blogs. Now, when it’s time to write articles, you can scan the headlines and gather ideas all at once.

We batch lots of things to save time and energy. One you’ve learned the idea of batching, you’ll find all sorts of ways to make it work for you.

If it’s worth doing, it’s Worth Re-Evaluating

Just because you’ve been doing something for months, doesn’t mean it’s the best use of your time. Quickly you’ll realize that some things you do generate more buzz, leads, and business than others. It’s useful to schedule a formal time each month to think through all of the things you’ve done and decide what’s working and what’s not. We try to block out time at the end of every month to make sure what we’re doing works.

Related Articles
  Social media : why should my business use this resource?
  Social Media Gains Momentum for B2B Marketers
  Where Are You in Social Media Adoption Curve?
  12 Tips for the Social Media Newbie
  Resourcing B2B social media

Article Tags: amazing book, blog, blogging, business builders, crap, facebook friends, great tools, gtd, losing ground, nbsp, quality articles, rsquo, submissions, time wasters, trolls, twitter



Related Forum Posts
Re: Kevin needs "social glue" ideas - Hi, I like the idea of "10 items that could act as "social glue" because I am an internet marketer. But I agree with the rest that the 10 recent post is nice. Maybe we should open up a new section in the forums on Social Media...or Social Media Marketing. I will tell you that the world is about 1 1/2 behind when it comes to understanding social media. Building a section now will put EvanCarmichael.com is a great position a year down the road when people realize Social Media can produce more traffic than SEO. Jeff
Re: Kevin needs "social glue" ideas - [quote="WebBizIdeas.com":gvtxsu7g]Hi, I like the idea of "10 items that could act as "social glue" because I am an internet marketer. But I agree with the rest that the 10 recent post is nice. Maybe we should open up a new section in the forums on Social Media...or Social Media Marketing. I will tell you that the world is about 1 1/2 behind when it comes to understanding social media. Building a section now will put EvanCarmichael.com is a great position a year down the road when people realize Social Media can produce more traffic than SEO. Jeff[/quote:gvtxsu7g] Hi Jeff, Thanks for the suggestion. Why don't you start a new post (with a poll) to see if there's enough interest in your idea for a social media section?
Re: Should Evan add a "Social Media Marketing" category to the f - Hi, Online Marketing would be a great title, and having sub categories would make it even better, there would plenty of categories to choose from, Social Media, SEO, Article Marketing and yes even Affiliate Marketing to name just a few, great looking site btw Jeff, take care, Carol
Re: Should Evan add a "Social Media Marketing" category to the f - Just as an update, Evan has extended the poll's expiration date and says he'd like to see at least 25 "yes" votes before implementing the new category. Moreover, it would probably be called "Online Marketing" instead of Social Media Marketing".
Kevin's Case Study #11 - A New Forum Category? - Hi Everyone, 2009 is a new year and I'd like to create a new forum category to jazz things up! In the past, there's been some interest voiced about adding a "Social Media Marketing", "Online Marketing", "Internet Marketing" or "Online Promotion" category. I'll implement [u:1g2tv6tf]ONE[/u:1g2tv6tf] of those new categories, but can someone first tell me what the difference would be between the existing "Marketing" section and one of those new options mentioned above? Thanks


Share this article with your friends. Fund someone's dream.

Leave a comment below or share on the left and you'll help support entrepreneurs in Africa through our partnership with Kiva. Over $50,000 raised and counting - Please keep sharing! Learn more.

Tweet

Newsletter

Get advice & tips from famous business
owners, new articles by entrepreneur
experts, my latest website updates, &
special sneak peaks at what's to come!

Name:
Email:

Popular Articles

Paint A Word Picture - Excite Your Customer

Tips to Take Control of Credit Card Debt

TOP Level Selling

Suggestions

Email us your ideas on how to make our
website more valuable! Thank you Sharon
from Toronto Salsa Lessons / Classes for
your suggestions to make the newsletter
look like the website and profile younger
entrepreneurs like Jennifer Lopez.