making time7

Welcome to social media week here on jackalopekid.com. The whole week will focus mainly on twitter, but that’s because I spend most of my time on there. I hope you learn something from all of my online experiences and I know I will learn something from you as well. I am no expert at social media by a long shot, but I have had some good things come from it. I’ve made numerous connections online (and some that become off screen meetings), increased blog traffic by a ton, and well frankly, it’s getting my thoughts out there. It’s all great stuff for me but let me tell you something, IT TAKES TIME. Right now I spend about two hours a day doing online stuff. When I first started twitter I was spending 4-5 hours per day growing the community and relationships. If you’re already doing the twitter power user thing, then you know it takes time. Making relationships always take time. But, if this is what you’re determined to do, then by all means make it happen. The next week is just some of my insight on the matter. Here we go…

*If you don’t care about more traffic to whatever you are doing, then don’t bother reading this.

SCHEDULE TIME PROPERLY

I have found this section is mainly for twitter and blog users. Facebook users always seem to be around. When you post to twitter or your blog, you’re wanting to reach all time zones to maximize tweet and blog viewings. My premium time to tweet in the mountain time zone is 8-11am. This is because I’m hitting California which is one hour behind me as well as central and east coast time zones at a maximized viewing time. 7am-12pm are twitter traffic’s highest times. If you can reach all time zones at these times, then you are golden. No matter where you are, 1pm-5pm are twitter’s slowest times of the day. Traffic drops off by almost 45%. After that you hit the night rush, 5pm-10pm. Those times go for any time zone. So personally, I save the material I want to get a lot of views for the morning and night rush.  This is tough sometimes when I think of something really good late at night, but I make myself save it for the next day.

PLAN AHEAD

Always think about what you’re wanting to tweet or blog about next. This way you are maximizing time because you already know what is going to happen. Also, set aside time to reply to the people that respond to your blog or tweets.  This is not a one sided thing, it takes two. I don’t want to get too far off the subject, so this will be a topic that comes up later in the week.

SCHEDULING TWEETS

I used to schedule tweets sometimes, but it eventually messed with my flow so I stopped doing it. However if you find this works for you, hootsuite makes it easy to do by offering scheduled tweets in their iPhone app. I’ve heard it works great for people with busy schedules who can’t find the time to tweet. I just want to make you aware that there are products out there that help with time management.

TWEETS TO FACEBOOK

Something that can also cut down on time is the ability to send tweets to facebook instead of copy/paste. Here are the directions on how to do that. If you want to only send some tweets to facebook here’s how you do that. Hope that helps.

So as you can see, this whole social media thing is STRATEGIC in placement. But, I can also guarantee it will pay off to actually put thought into everything.

What do you think about this? Is there anything you can add onto this?