Making the Most of Your Social Scheduling

The latest infographic from Dendrite Park suggests social media for your company could be handled in as little as 60 minutes a day. If you’re struggling to finish all your scheduling, maintain interaction with clients and would-be customers, and come up with fresh ways to reach people, all on top of the other marketing responsibilities you have, then 60 minutes and done sounds too good to be true.

Before we break this thing down, take a look at the proposed values each outlet is given.

Content curation and blog writing are given the bulk of the allotted time, which makes a lot of sense. Generating content of any kind, whether curated or created, takes effort. Facebook is then given more weight than any of the other social media platforms, and also for good reason. With billions of users to the other outlets’ paltry millions, Facebook deserves the extra attention. To round out the hour, each of the remaining accounts are given five minutes. Simple, right?

But Does It Work?

We hear all those harried social media managers sighing in relief around the world. Finally, a real plan! If we could get everything condensed into one hour, we’d have time for more strategizing, more socializing…just more. Before you get too excited, let’s consider the practical applications of the plan. Like…who can write a compelling, optimized, grammatically correct, 400-word blog post in fifteen minutes? Maybe a few people, sure, but unless you’re a seasoned writer, you’re probably going to need to pull some time away from other activities to finish your blog each day.

Or what about Facebook posts that generated hundreds of questions, concerns, or even just pats on the back? Can you deal with all of those in ten minutes? Unless you’re Superman/Superwoman, probably not. Does this mean the infographic is useless? Of course not.

Practice Makes Perfect

Only you know which social media outlets are most important to your company’s marketing efforts. When putting together an “hour-or-less” plan, you have to take your company’s specific needs into consideration. You also need to consider the possibility that your social media’s role in marketing is too large to allot only one hour.

Instead of trying to squeeze your plans into the model outlined here, try creating a similar model that fits your strategy perfectly. You may need to give more time for blogging and less time to Google+, or more time to Twitter and less time to Facebook. The important thing is that you come up with a “Social Media Cocktail” that fits your tastes.

The Bottom Line

What everything boils down to is this: You can streamline your social media strategy, as long as you make a plan and stick to it. Maybe your plan will take more time each day that someone else’s plan, and that’s okay. The key is a plan. A schedule. A framework upon which to build your social media strategy.  If you can’t get it down to the hour Dendrite Park suggests, don’t sweat it. We guarantee you’ll still have a much more manageable schedule, anyway.

Image credit: freedigitalphotos.net/Sira Anamwong