Social media: friend or foe?

Shauna Trainor, marketing manager with the Covenant Group in Toronto, says maintaining a focused social-media strategy requires discipline and planning. She shares three ways to be effective on social media — without dawdling:

> Create a schedule
Find out which is the best time of day is for you to check in and see what your connections are saying. If you use surface public transit to get to work, you could use your travel time to check you social media accounts. Another option is to take some time during lunch to log in.

The key is to find that time of day when you know you can check LinkedIn or Facebook without interfering with the completion of other important tasks.

You can also choose to assign specific days to different platforms, Trainor says. Twitter would require more regular check-ins because of its emphasis on daily interaction. But you might choose to commit only three days a week to LinkedIn, which doesn’t have the same concentration on instantaneous feedback.

> Save your reading for later
You want to keep up with what people within your networks are saying. But you can’t afford to spend an hour of a busy workday reading your client’s blog post about her European vacation.

So, make a note of links you would like to revisit at a more appropriate time. On Twitter, you can mark an item as a “favourite,” so you can find it easily. You can also create an account with an app such as Instapaper, which stores links to webpages to be read later. (Instapaper offers a free version.) Alternatively, you can simply copy the link to your document software and pull it up when you have more time.

> Get your team involved
Whether your social media presence involves a team account or your own individual page, your colleagues can help you manage your participation — if your compliance department allows the practice.

Ensure that your team members are aware of the tone of your posts and the kind of information you would share. One way to assist them is to provide examples of magazines and newspapers you read so they understand the type of content you would post.

For example, if you know many of your clients share your passion for your local hockey team, tell your staff that you subscribe to The Hockey News. They can check THN’s website, blog posts and tweets relating to your team.

Be sure to stay up to date with what your team members are posting. “If a team member shares an article on your behalf,” Trainor sauys, “they can print it and put it on your desk so you can at least scan it over.”

This is the first instalment in a two-part series on improving your effectiveness on social media.

Next: Making the most of technology tools.