How to Manage Your Social Media Activity

One of the questions that I get a lot now, which I didn’t get 10 years ago is, “How do you manage all of your social media activity?” Ten years ago we didn’t have social media but now you’ve got your Facebook profile and fan page, you’ve got Twitter, LinkedIn and Google Plus and the list goes on. So, how do you make sense of it all and how do you set it up so that it doesn’t totally consume your time because remember, you should be doing many different things to attract more clients.

One of the things that I say to people all the time is, “Facebook is not a marketing plan.” I know that the online marketers are probably going crazy right now saying, “Yes Fabienne, you can get clients from Facebook.” Yes, of course you can. In fact, I get yummy clients from Facebook myself. I also get yummy clients from twitter too; however, too many people spend all of their time on one of these vehicles and forget all about the other things you could be doing to accelerate your client attraction.

Facebook and social media should be one slice of your entire marketing pie. And how do you make sure that you don’t have all your time sucked into social media? Let me share with you how I do it. I have three levels of activity on social media.

The first level is very simple. It’s completely out of my hands. In fact, it’s out of anybody’s hands. It’s the automatic updates that happen without a person touching it (or very minimally). What I mean by that is for example, when we post something to the blog it automatically through the wonders of technology, gets posted on Facebook and twitter and on all of these other platforms. It gets set up and is completely automated by your virtual assistant or your web person, or another member of your team.

Level two involves taking content that I’ve already created or posts that I’ve already written or pictures or testimonials and having somebody else upload those and schedule them. This takes another person, perhaps a social media manager to pre-schedule these posts ahead of time using HootSuite or something like that or grabbing content that you’ve already written and putting it up. So, Level One is automated and Level Two is ‘done for you.’

The third level is you, done by you. This level is really important and it’s where people can tell that you’ve actually written this yourself. It could be a status update or a picture. It could be something that you’re doing on a weekend. It could be something that you have on your desk, a book that you’re reading, commenting, but the idea is that you allow people into your life. Now, we’re not talking about your private life, but you can let them into your personal life just a little bit.

What’s good about Level 3 is that it furthers that Know-Like-Trust Factor massively because remember, people don’t hire you if they don’t know you, they don’t like you or they don’t trust you. When you share a little bit of your life, they will. That’s what happens. You also want to be responding to other posts and to others’ comments as well, as yourself.

Have you ever followed someone who only posts “promote-y” type things over and over again? Don’t you get really turned off? Here’s the key. You have to have a mix of the types of statuses that you put up there, so it could be a work thing or it could be re-tweeting or reposting an interesting article. It could be a quote that you’ve gotten from a book or a famous author. It could be your own musings, your own reflections on life and observations. It could be something funny. It could be something personal. It could be something tender and eliciting lots of yummy comments.

The idea is that you do a mix of these things. You entertain and you observe and you share something that you’ve found and you share something personal about yourself. When you do this, you create this three-dimensional person instead of just being somebody who just promotes a lot of things, which can be a really big turnoff.

Here’s what I believe. There’s just too much slick out there. Do you know what I mean? Everyone’s just so perfect on the outside. If you add a little bit of yourself, a little bit of grit to the slick, then you become a more real person that can be known, liked and trusted.

Your Client Attraction Assignment

Really look at how you can manage your social media activity so that it doesn’t run you. Instead, you run it. That’ll give you a lot of freedom so that you can still have a big presence on social media, but you don’t have to have all of your time taken by it. I check in about three or four times a day for about five to eight minutes each time, but I know people who spend hours and hours and hours on it. Don’t let that be you. You can be really effective without all of your time being spent on it.