How can you use Social Media tips when you’re away from the office for a week?
What can you do to stay in touch with your clients when you’re out of town on a trip or vacation? I’ve been playing hooky: I went to a tennis ranch in Texas where we played tennis six hours a day. I was able to schedule publishing on my client blogs ahead of time, but my own blog suffered.
The good news is that it got me thinking about shortcuts and what can be done to extend your reach of online content marketing using social media tips.
Many of my readers are busy professionals who don’t have a lot of time. The danger of sites like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn is that they can suck you in and spit you out hours later… and time is money.
For those of you who have the bare minimum of time, and still want to get results, here are a few social media tips. Please feel free to join in and add other tips in the comments section. I must be doing something right: these tips have resulted in new clients directly from Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.
If you don’t want to mess with this stuff, ask a virtual assistant (VA) like Serenity VA to help. There are plenty of people available, some expensive, some not. (If you want a recommendation, ask me!)
It’s time-consuming to set up your accounts, write your profiles and get your blog posts to feed to each site. Hiring someone to do this for you makes sense, because you are freeing up brain-space for more creative and challenging work.
- Time-saving tip: Use social media. Even when out-of-office, you can easily stay connected via social media. If you’ve pre-written your blog posts, you can easily post links through your social media when new posts appear. Ideally, you should identify a quote or excerpt from your blog and schedule it to automatically post at peak usage time(s). If you do nothing else but automate this, you’ll start to drive traffic back to your blog from these sites and reach many more readers. If you don’t have blog posts feeding automatically, check out HootSuite. This free tool will allow you to schedule a blog post feed to several social sites at a time.
- Time-saving tip: Join the conversations on Twitter. Besides driving traffic back to your blog, Twitter is a great tool to help you find, follow and join conversations. Follow up with comments and status updates that mention your field of #expertise and associated #keywords. Check out SocialOomph.com and TweetDeck. These free tools will allow you to set up email keyword alerts. Be sure to include your name, business field of expertise, and associated keywords in your keyword alerts.
- Time-saving tip: Create and/or join groups in LinkedIn. LinkedIn is highly valued for its predominance of business-minded people. Ask a question and get valuable input and connect with people in your field. Answers you receive will help you create blog posts, expand your network, and help you gain credibility. Hot tip: Be sure to join specialty groups and add to their discussions with short blurbs and a link back to your blog. This has to be done manually, but it can be outsourced to a VA, as long as you monitor for comments and responses. Another hot tip: When creating a link to your post, you can save character spaces by shortening your link. Free shortening tools include: bit.ly / buff.ly / j.mp .
- Time-saving tip: Use a VA. There are many low-fee virtual assistants who now specialize in social media management. Some of them are in India, Mexico, and the Philippines so you can keep your costs low. You can also find VAs in the states that bring a lot of value. Either way, a VA can schedule tweets for you at intervals during the day and alert you when you need to respond.
Social media sites are designed to help you connect and network, so be sure to monitor them. If you’re using a VA, and I recommend it, don’t make the mistake of turning over all your participation to her or him. Nothing turns off people more than realizing they aren’t connecting with you, but a hired gun.
What time-saving social media tips can you share for extending the reach of your content marketing and blogs through social media?
And if you’re still having trouble, I’ve got more tips in a great little package you can have called Time Saving Tips for Smart Bloggers, audio, transcript, and PDF handouts. You can solve your blogging blues with all the tips in this program.
What resources do you use to find ideas? I’d love to hear from you, contact me here.
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