My wife once said to me, “I don’t have 2 or 3 hours a day to be on Social Media like you do.” I told her that she really doesn’t know me then. Even with working with several social media clients, I rarely spend that much time online every day. As a followup to my recent posts, Getting Up to Speed With Twitter and How to Manage Information Without Overwhelm, let’s take a broad look at the implementation of a  social media strategy.

For mid-sized companies, social media should be a part of an integrated marketing plan.  It usually needs to co-exist with other tactics and hopefully enhance them.  As you define your broad marketing plan, you choose from a range of activities that meet your objectives, capabilities and budget with respect to your overall target audience and segments.  From there you evaluate each component; yellow pages generating fewer calls, so you cut back or eliminate.  Presenting at an industry conference resulted in a large order from a new customer, so you may decide to return or even participate in more events.

Or maybe having everyone out of the office was problematic and everyone returned from the conference exhausted, leads you to decide that attending conferences is not worth the effort.

It’s the same with social media.  On a broad level, you may conclude that you don’t have the resources to take on additional tactics or you might decide that selected employees have the skill-set or that a consultant or coach can supplement your online activities.

If you choose to do it in-house, or with a coach, you should decide how, when and how often you will participate with each platform.  A daily, weekly and monthly plan can help throttle your investment in time while also providing metrics you’ll use to assess your efforts and revise your strategy.  You can use tools to improve your efficiency, such as Tweetdeck or Hootsuite to schedule posts in advance and to sort the people you follow by objective or niche.  You might choose other submitter to post articles or videos to multiple sites.

Here is a simple social media weekly checklist that I created for a client:

1) Schedule a week of tweets in Tweetdeck to maintain a social media presence throughout the week.  These can include links to blog posts, especially your own, but also to other information that your target audience(s) will appreciate.  I often re-tweet others in advance.  Some people share quotes, but I’m not a huge fan despite liking them sometimes. Some sort of reminders work too.  I would do a few every day and sometimes clump a couple of them together, minutes apart.  Don’t forget to schedule tweets in the middle of the night for the benefit of fans in other parts of the  world!

2) Spend 15-20 minutes 2-3 times per day asking questions of other’s tweets or commenting on them.  (9 am, 1pm and 5-ish work well, but do what works best for you) Ask your own questions, link to and share appropriate information.  Don’t obsess about doing this.  If you miss a little (hey, we all get busy) you have scheduled tweets in advance to maintain a presence.

3) Spend a little time once or twice a day adding information to your Facebook fan page.  Share useful information.  Work a little in groups several times per week.

4) Spend a little time every week staying up-to-date on the latest Twitter and Facebook tactics.

Total time investment: ~ 5 hours per week

If this client had a blog, I would have added doing a post at least 2-3 times per week and a pillar post once a month. (1-3 hours)

If using YouTube or Vimeo, you’ll want to budget and schedule a live video or a Camtasia video using Powerpoint. (Time TBD)

I think you’ll also benefit from scheduling marketing initiatives on a daily, weekly and monthly basis!

As with any business development or marketing initiative, the investment of time, resources and money is a part of the ROI equation.  Increasing revenue and profits is GOOD.  Increasing time and resources can be BAD.

More on using social media to build ROI.

What time-saving social media tactics do you suggest?