A Model Day for Social Media

(Editor’s Note: Like this post? You might also be interested in our free eBook, The Value of Influencer Marketing.)

Time and time again I hear that marketers (or those looking to elevate their personal brands) simply “don’t have time” to make social media really work.

The truth is whether or not you have not viewed it as a priority or really are too busy with other activities, there are ways to quickly integrate some critical activities in your day to day routine.  (Note:  I have written about finding time for influencer marketing before so be sure to check out that post for some great time management tips too).

Many recognize the value that social media can bring to any B2B company – brand awareness, customer engagement, brand personality to name a few.  But is there a best practice process to maintaining your presence and engaging your following in terms of social media?  Brian Zimmerman has written about the model day for success in terms of sales in the past and these principals can be applied to social media.  Brian’s post describes the model day as being broken down into proactive and reactive activities.

Proactive Activities

First, proactive activities are any campaign-related activities including outreach to a target list of influencers, prospects, or customers. Including:

• Posting your content to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, and any other networks you are active on
• Sharing externally created content to your social networks
• Sharing photos or videos on your social networks
• Actively reaching out to your influencers through social media and asking a question or sharing content
• Starting a poll or discussion in your LinkedIn group
• Sending a #FF tweet
• Inviting people to participate in your group
• Posting promotional information
• Monitor results

Reactive Activities

Second, reactive activities deal with any inbound opportunities or points of communication. From my perspective, they include:

• Ongoing conversation between your company and your audience on social media
• Answering a question on Quora or LinkedIn
• Replying to comments or questions
• Thanking your followers for sharing your content
• Retweeting or reposting content that your audience has previously shared
• Accept “friend requests”

Here is the model day for social media that I follow each day for OpenView to make juggling all of the accounts in as little as an hour a day:

Morning

1. 10 minutes of reactive activities
2. 20 minutes of proactive activities

Afternoon

1. 10 minutes of reactive activities

Evening

1. 10 minutes of reactive activities
2. 10 minutes of proactive activities to prepare for the next morning

How do you manage your social media activities?