Adapting time management tips for social media growth

A QUICK Google search on "social media time management" will leave you with a flurry of options and key steps to follow through for high efficiency. However, a lot of those details and pointers are sometimes very sketchy.

This is not because they are not powerful, but due to the fact that they tend to rely on underlying assumptions that may not hold true for your brand culture.

As a one-time frequent attendee of Social Media Conferences in Asia and specifically India, I used to find it quite challenging to pick up learnings and insights at times.

The key reason was that most of the social media commentary and examples were heavily US centric. If you come from another culture or location, you already know that may just not work for you purely because you may be on a different S-curve of social media growth. Hence, depending on where you see yourself and your brand, your plans may need adaptation.

Your social brand positioning

Since this is a self-assessment exercise with no harmful brand results if you mark yourself on the given scale, I hope you are accurately able to define your positioning. In this piece, I will focus on the first two.

For the social media leader

It may be worthwhile to re-evaluate your social media weekly plans along these buckets for efficiency.

Sometimes, it is observed that, bigger or more socially forward teams tend to rely on tools only because they get used to them. It is always critical to be open to new tools that may improve your way of working, help you get more impact in a far more efficient manner. Some examples for each category are:

For the social media enthusiast

It may be worthwhile to make a plan and depending on your goals, allocate your time and resources towards these.

This may mean, if you have a customer support team, that they can spend time on your channel and answer key questions from consumers to keep up engagement.

Another example could be, if there's a special event that your company is organising, you may ask a few employees to send social media updates relevant to your products, brands and related conversations.

The idea is, it is critical to utilise other teams for social media content creation and sharing and slowly build a culture of content.

A single approver will ensure that the brand tonality remains the same and you are sure of what content is being created by various team members in a real-time fashion. Recently launched Outbox Pro, Buffer and Hootsuite have these functionalities.

I hope that all the social media and brand managers are able to put these simple frameworks into context of their own organisations and march ahead!