Budgeting Your Twitter Time

Wow! Time flies when you’re having fun, right? I planned to blog my way through TGP’s social media adventure, and it’s been too long since I last posted. So much has happened! Let me fill you in…

Twitter is covered; I walked you through our entire process. But things don’t always go as planned and very few of us are tweeting on a regular basis so far. Actually, my best tweeter isn’t even listed on our pages! I should probably change that; Melissa Whitmer, Client Partner, regularly finds interesting articles that she posts for our followers. I haven’t even been on ever day, I’m sorry to admit.

Someone asked me the other day how to budget your time on Twitter, so here is my process:

• Check “Followers” – As a rule of thumb, businesses should follow anyone who is following them, unless it is obvious spam. So I check my followers to see if I have yet to follow any of them and I do so.
• Check “@messages” and reply to anyone (if necessary) to anyone who has mentioned us in a tweet.
• Check “Direct Messages” and reply to anyone who has sent us a message; unless it is a canned “thanks for following me!” message. Sidenote: PLEASE don’t auto-DM. It’s insincere and it’s become a pet peeve of mine. The ONLY good one I’ve seen is Rick Telberg’s (@CPA_Trendlines) because his doesn’t sound canned; he actually asks how you found him which I think is interesting information to gather.

Once I’m caught up there, then I post a few tweets. I do subscribe to many RSS feeds (tweets) of the thought-leaders I am following, so often I scroll through their recent posts to see if there’s something I want to retweet (RT). Then, I try to post a message or two myself, whether it’s about an upcoming event (Solo & Small Firms Conference or Management Summit) or an interesting article I came across and wanted to share.

All of that should take you only about 15-20 minutes. If you can schedule this in twice a day, you’re golden with Twitter (I would suggest morning and mid-afternoon). Remember, tweets only get about 5 minutes of “air time”, so if it’s an important message, tweet it multiple times.

I’ve also set up our Facebook Fan pages (for Solo & Small Firms Conference and Management Summit) and LinkedIn Groups for both. Stay tuned for details on Facebook and LinkedIn!