Social Media Time Management, Step 1

This morning I posted an item (Looking Beyond the ‘Twitter Costs Businesses $2.25 Billion’ Headline) about a survey which concludes that employees are wasting a lot of time on the job using social media for personal reasons.

The real problem, it turns out, is that most organizations haven’t created and communicated a social media policy to employees. But even if a policy is enacted, that still begs the question of how people can best use social media in the workplace. Amber Naslund over at Altitude Branding has come up with a framework for people to most efficiently use social media on the job.

She suggests you answer a number of questions to help formulate your personal/professional social media strategy, the first step toward optimizing your social media time management. Among them:

Realistically, how many hours do I have to spend in social media each day?

Which two or three tools and social networks make sense based on my listening efforts?

What is my goal for participation on those sites?

Have we evaluated our current online and offline communication efforts to determine what’s working and what we might supplement or replace with social media?

Has our leadership bought into this idea already, or am I establishing a presence so I can build a stronger case?

What does success look like?

That one’s easy: A lot of Twitter followers! (Just kidding.)

Naslund says tomorrow’s post will look at “time allocation for varying social media tasks like listening, responding, content creation, and measurement.”

Join Baratunde Thurston (left), The Onion’s Director of Digital and author of How to Be Black, for an entertaining look at creative social media campaigns in our Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting February 16. Other speakers include Morin Oluwole (Facebook), Tim Devane (bitly), and SocialTimes' writer Devon Glenn.   Register now.