We have reached a point where we all have to agree — We just can’t ignore the Social Media anymore. It’s everywhere we turn. Even the news media is monitoring Twitter and the Blogsphere. Most of our clients are on Facebook, a few are on Twitter, we are LinkeIn to all our business contacts and employers, and all of us spend time on YouTube watching videos.

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So the question is:

How in the world do we find time to do all these things when we are busier than ever, just keeping up with our daily business tasks? Even our email inbox is continually filled to the brim all day long.

There is a couple of different ways to approach this.

  • We could simply hire someone to do it all for us. But most small businesses cannot really afford to pay someone to do it on an ongoing basis because the return on investment is so small – but that doesn’t mean you can ignore it and not do it.
  • We find a way to absolutely minimize our time to 20 minutes once a week, and a few minutes daily for monitoring what is happening – like we do on Facebook.

The first step:

The secret is to come up with at least one message a week and then blog that message on our websites – which is easy if your website is built on WordPress – and then with the proper plugin, your blog message is sent out to every Social Media channel that exists – automatically. The Tweet is tweeted. The Facebook post is posted. The Google+ entry is entered. The Tumblr microblog is microblogged. Etc.

Do it once and then hit send.

The second step:

Open a free account on HootSuite so that you can monitor all your Social platforms from one browser tab / window. Spend 2-3 minutes, 2-3 times per day monitoring it to see if there are any questions or comments.

And there you have it. 20 minutes to blog and 5-10 minutes a day monitoring it.

Of course you can get much more involved if you choose to and at least in this way, if a particular channel starts to pay off with potential new clients, then you have identified it and you can wisely proceed with a larger investment of time.

There are many ways to connect all your online blogs and posts to each other to minimize your time and you can even preload social posts for 90 days in advance and have them “dripped out” once a day. But if you choose a method like this, be sure to log in when something is current or hot and talk about it in addition to your “drip feed” posts and tweets.