How to maintain your social brand when you're too busy

Did you know the average person spends about 3-5 hours a day in front of a computer or mobile device?!

Well, for someone who does inbound, like myself (or maybe for a teenager) those numbers might even be a little modest. Can I get a show of hands? How many people know they spend more time than that behind a glowing screen?

It’s kind of crazy when you really sit down and think about it.

But with 61% of global internet users researching products online, it shouldn’t surprise you when we say, if you don’t have an online presence, you better get started because you're already behind!

And to make it easy for you, we’ve decided to share some tips on how to maintain your social brand when you're too busy.

If you don’t think you can scrimp 20 minutes out of the 240ish minutes a day that you spend behind that screen of yours, go ahead and go to another networking event (2 hours) or another tradeshow (days) trying to get one lead. We dare you.

But for those of you who are game, here’s the breakdown:

• Spend 5 minutes crafting what you want to say. Remember to make it valuable. Do one of four things with your post: 1) give information, 2) provide analysis 3) offer assistance or 4) be entertaining. Make sure you have a compelling image or graphic to go with it, too. Try using Canva.com for this, it's one of our favorite go-to's.

• Spend another 5 minutes scheduling in the content you just created. It works even better if you create some of this content outside of these 20 minutes we are suggesting you use each day on your social media presence. Sitting down and drafting out a week’s worth of content or blog posts will give you the chance to make your messages be of good quality. It will also give you more time to schedule and tweak and heck, you may even be able to squeeze in a game of office ping pong.

• Spend 7 minutes a day responding to those fans who have commented on your page or interacted with your business in some way. If they are taking the time out of their day to ask a question or leave feedback, they are expecting you to do the same in return. In the beginning, you might not have a ton of interaction taking place on your page. During this time you could work on building the conversation by engaging on the pages of other businesses that you want your business to have a relationship with.

• Spend your final 3 minutes reviewing your past posts. See what worked well before and take into consideration the things that didn’t do as well, too. By doing this, you’ll be able to take ideas back to the drawing board when crafting your next set of posts and hopefully in turn, make something great that will really resonate with your fans.

If I’ve done my math correctly, that adds up to a mere 20 minutes that you’ve invested in growing your online fan base. With 80% of US social network users preferring to connect to brands through Facebook (and other forms of social media), our last thought is, what are you waiting for?!