Social media marketing takes up far too much of your time.  It’s frustrating, it’s hard to keep up and interferes with other work of higher priority!

But if you have a good daily routine and the right tools you can save a significant amount of time.

Social media accounts for over 18% of our time spent on line.  This is just the average, if you run a business and are active on social media this may be more.

Here is a routine we follow with a range of tools we use.  Let us know if this routine will help you and what you could suggest to make it even better.

1. Write Content

Maybe you’re not a natural writer but you don’t need to be.  You just need to get into the habit of writing content.

Content comes in two forms:

• Short Content – This is where you just write some tweets or facebook updates engage with your audience. Or search through your twitter stream to look for people to interact with.  You don’t necessarily need a plan for this, you just need to limit the time you spend on it. Hootsuite is great for doing this but spend some time learning how to use Hootsuite and the great functionality is provides so you save time.

• Long Content! – This is where you should set aside focussed time to write your blog posts, podcast, create your video or add to your eBook.  A focussed time where you need to set a deadline.

If you write blogs here are 2 tools that will help remove some distractions.

Freedom – This app locks you out of the internet.  There have been many studies about multi-tasking and it just doesn’t work.  So if you don’t need access to the internet when you write your content then block it off using Freedom.

AntiSocial - This app blocks you off from the more social parts of the internet for example Facebook and Twitter.  If you need access to the internet but don’t want to be distracted by Facebook, Twitter email etc then antisocial is great.  Unfortunately it’s only available on the mac but I’m sure there’s an equivalent windows version.

2. Share Great Content

You don’t want to share your content all the time so it’s essential to read other content.   Subscribe to a range of blogs and use a reader application such as Feedly to read the articles.  We wrote a recently article on how to use feedly with bufferapp.  You read the content with feedly and share it out at suitable times using buffer (which schedules delivery of content to a variety of social media platforms at pre-determined times.

There are a variety of other tools you can  use to find great content and one them is Triberr who was founded by  Dino Dogan.  You can join tribes that are relevant to your business and find great articles worth sharing.

As you browse through Triberr you see a summary of an article and if it’s of interest you can view the article and then share it out.  The following is an example of an article by Ted Rubin that was excellent.

3. Nurture Relationships

The most important part of your social media day is building and nurturing relationships.  Find new people to interact with and interact more with your existing contacts.

Nimble is an excellent tool to manage relationships.  You can monitor a list of people, view all their social activity and it will also display when you last interacted with a person.  This helps to ensure that you stay in contact with people.    Take a couple of minutes each day and interact with a few of your great contacts.  Even if it is just to send them a tweet saying hello and asking them how they are doing.

The example below shows Nimble tracking when I last contacted interacted with Aaron Lee.

4. Connect with New People

Through social media you can build our network every day.

• Browse through your twitter stream and find relevant people sharing great content.

• Use ManageFlitter or Socialbro to find new people.

• Read more! – You may have a list of blogs that you subscribe to but you can also find new people by reading relevant online magazines, searching for other blogs in your industry and more.  A great way to connect with new people.

5. Check Your Analytics

It’s important to check your analytics on a daily basis.  Check what posts your created got shared the most, which tweets were useful, what traffic you got on your site.  This all helps you prepare for the next day!

So that is some of our daily tasks we perform on social media.

It would be really helpful if you shared your tips or just give us some feedback!