Staying active online!

Social media and digital communication are constantly changing and they will not go away soon. The impact of technology on businesses is constantly changing across generations. There is the need to understand how this affects your business today and the implications for tomorrow.

How do you keep up with these changes and implement them to ensure that you remain relevant, especially when you are very busy and need to get a lot of things done? It looks like everyone keeps brandishing Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Pintrest in front of you and you wonder where they have the time to get on these networks.

While some people seem to be always active, chatting, tweeting and ‘alive’ on Twitter, not everyone has the time to be ‘always on’ because they need to switch off mentally and emotionally to focus on real life activity or work. Here are tips and ideas to get you going on social media while you are busy doing lots of other stuff.

Have clear objectives

Most active people on social media platforms have an overriding reason and it is important you have yours. It is not a smart reason to just be on Facebook and Twitter. As an important information network, Twitter is a great platform to network and connect with people across geographical and industrial barriers.

It is also a great platform to establish and promote your business or personal brand. You can build a following by being a curator of awesome content. Businesses are active on social media because they want to touch base with their target audience. Bloggers and entrepreneurs are there to promote their products and services, blog posts, articles, events and all other things they find interesting and worthy of sharing with the online community. If you do not have time, you have not discovered the value in it.

Let tools be your companions

One of the good things about social media platforms is the use of third-party tools and resources. While social media are platforms for connecting with others and sharing incredible stuff, busy people have found a way to balance their activity by using tools.

Tools like Tweetdeck and Hootsuite allow you to use their mobile or web application to monitor and post across several social networks at the same time. From one platform your content can reach Facebook, Twitter and Google plus with one send button.

 A tool like Bufferapp, Scoop.it, deli.cious allows you to share websites you find interesting with your online social networks. Some functionality can even be extended to be able to pre-load and schedule posts and tweets across times. For example, my work takes a lot of browsing, writing and research; Bufferapp therefore allows me to share content that I find intresting with my social networks. The important part is to find the one which best works for you.

Create time to respond to messages and tweets

Social media is about interaction. Therefore, it is important to find ways to meaningfully engage your target audience. It is not about how many fans your business page has; it is about how many of them are meaningfully engaged with the brand. Even if you have tools to share interesting articles, posts and videos take time out to respond to questions and comments, give feedback on blog posts, articles and to have natural conversations with others on social media.

Identify your influencers

When you have identified your objective, it will be great to follow some of your industry influencers on Twitter and Facebook. Subscribe to updates from their websites and even create a reading dashboard where you can glance at all updates from several websites through one dashboard. Feedly.com will do that neatly for you. Influencers are people, who by reason of either being off-line authorities that joined Twitter or online authorities, have established themselves as content curators of information on a specific topic.

Create an alert system

Apart from being alerted when people directly refer to you on social media platforms, you can create an alert system that monitors  your name, business or competitors online. Tools like Topsy and Google Alert will simply be awesome in achieving this.

Single tool, multi screen

When choosing tools be sure to go for one that allows you to work across devices. Because we are a multi-screen generation, it is not uncommon to find that successful online tools are more likely to permit you to work across your computing devices – mobile/smart phone, laptop or tablet. You can start work on one platform and end up on another without having to move or copy files around. A tool like Hootsuite allows you to do that seamlessly. Online storage tools that permit this include Google Drive, Dropbox and Evernote. I have started a presentation on my laptop, continued editing through a mobile device on my way to the presentation and made the presentation from my laptop all because Dropbox allows me to do so.

Use ‘down time’ as Twitter/Facebook scanning time

Those times we commute between locations, wait for meetings and lie on our beds can be used productively scanning the ‘always on’ cocktail happening on Twitter and Facebook. Once you have accessed it through mobile, you can use your spare times to catch up on your well-planned Twitter streams.

Social media is alive. It is its own country, permitting people across the world to connnect, collaborate and communicate effectively. I have met people asking how come people have the time and I simply say the shift must first happen in the mind before it happens in real time.

Whether it is Tumblr, Pinterest, Google+, or Instagram, there are more options than ever. The problem is that managing multiple accounts can be an arduous and time-consuming endeavour. To make it a little easier on you, it is important to find out how it fits into your life and business goals and the tools to make implementation easy.