How to Maximize Your Time Spent on Social Media

Please raise your hand if you've ever felt like you were wasting your time on social media.

FaceBook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ are just some of the few tabs you have open at any given moment. The activity feeds of all the sites are constantly streaming by with pictures and jokes that have no impact on you or your business. As the minutes pass ten, twenty, sixty you realize you are not spending your time wisely, especially when other aspects of your business could use the help.

Well, don’t worry there’s good news: With a little discipline and a couple set blocks of time, soon you will be in control and able to accomplish what you need efficiently and quickly.

Follow these next few steps, and we’ll walk through how to wisely spend your time on social media. When we’re done you’ll know exactly how to maximize your time spent and get a maximum return. Let’s dive in.

5 Steps to Maximizing Your Time on Social Media

1.) Track your time on the computer for the week.

Before you start diving into the restructure of your social media habits, we need to monitor how you currently spend your time on the computer throughout the week. You want to establish the three or four main time syncs of your current computer habits. Then, you can decide whether these habits are valuable to you and your business before completely start from scratch.

Keep in mind that some of your habits might be on the correct track, but just need to be completed in a more structured manner.

Nothing to overly analytical about this process, keying in on a few points creates our base for improvements.

2.) Brainstorm list of social media values.

After you've monitored your computer habits for the last week, now you must figure out what values you hope to achieve through social media. Similar to the first step—create a list of why you use social media and also what you wish to accomplish using it.

You can refer to How to Set Social Media Goals for specific examples.

3.) Set focused blocks of time.

Whether you plan on devoting anywhere from 20 minutes all the way up to a few hours, breaking up your efforts into focused blocks of time is one of the main focuses of optimization.

Start by choosing any combination of morning, noon and afternoon to be your designated social media times. For example, let’s say you want to devote 45 minutes a day to social media. Break that 45 minutes into multiple 15 minute segments and for those 15 minutes focus only on replying, updating and curating your social media feeds.

4.) Choose your most important goals and stick with them.

Some days you might feel short on time during your predetermined social media sessions. Without risking falling back into your old unstructured way of doing social media, during these times prioritize your most important goals first.

 Making sure to reply to comments and tweets is much more important than scheduling a post for next week, so the less pressing matters can be pushed back to later in the day or sometimes different days all together.

5.) Modify based on results.

Once you are settled into your allotted social media times, the next step in the process is fine tuning. A few times a month or whenever you have reached a milestone you should re-evaluate your goals.

Highlighting the differences between the goals that are currently be fulfilled and those that are not fully being reached, allows you to devote more resources and time to certain areas. Eventually you will find a balance that allows you to pursue all your goals equally.

There you go, now you are ready to manage your social media in a more consistent and efficient way. And you know what the best part is? Now your social media will work for you, instead of the other way around.

Have any more questions about common social media tips? Don’t hesitate to ask.