Top 10 Tips for Boosting Social Media Productivity

Even though you are aware of the importance of social media in today’s ecommerce, if you are like most entrepreneurs, you wear a lot of hats and need to optimize the time you spend on social media marketing.

Here are 10 timely tips to help you improve your social media productivity:

1. Take advantage of some of the simple yet effective FREE tools available online to maximize the time you spend on social media marketing. Here is an article with links to some great free tools:

Twitter Management Tools for eCommerce Social Media Marketing

2. Maximize your messages! When it comes to Twitter, especially, with its 140 character limit for tweets---you must choose your words and your messages wisely! So, pack as much of a punch as you possibly can into the messages you send and really make each one count! Think quality rather than quantity!

3. Be choosy about the company you keep. There is no point whatsoever in trying to form close relationships with everybody on every social site you frequent. Instead, focus on the members who offer the most value.

4. Try all of the most popular social sites such as Facebook, Twitter and MySpace, then experiment to see which ones give you the most bang for your buck, so to speak. Once you’ve narrowed it down to two or three---concentrate on those and forget the others.

5. Have a blog. This is probably one of the most important and effective things you can do for your ecommerce business! Blogs are part and parcel of the whole social media scene, and if you do it right, you can build up quite a following of readers. Don’t try to make your blog all about your business!

6. Organize and schedule the time you spend on social media. Otherwise, it can take over your life the way Kudzu vine has swallowed up the entire South if you let it. Allocate X amount of minutes or hours at specified times, and stick to your schedule.

7. Don’t waste time on duplicate effort! There are free tools available that allow you to post across several social sites simultaneously. This saves a lot of time!

8. Use batch processing! If you can set aside even a couple of hours a week to devote to one aspect of social media marketing, it can be a big help in maximizing your efforts. For instance, if you have a business blog, take2-3 hours every week and write blog posts, or just research material for blog posts so that you will have a clear idea of what you’re going to write before you start, which is a huge timesaver. One trick many bloggers use is to take their laptops somewhere nice and comfy---offline---where they can write with no distractions.

9. Use an RSS feeder for reading blogs and articles that help keep you up-to-date on current events and trends, things you need to know about for social media marketing. Trying to plow through them one-by-one is a lengthy and time consuming process.

10. Use a filter such as PostRank to help you weed out the blogs and articles you don’t want to keep up with, and keep the rest in order of importance.

The time you spend on social media marketing will pay you back with dividends, especially if you use that time wisely!