Social Media Fitness – Aerobic Endurance and Content Curation

Welcome to the third installment of Social Media Fitness – Zone Training: Aerobic Endurance and Content Curation. You can read about Zone 1 and Zone 2 to catch up with the series. We have warmed up by doing our research and preparing our strategy. We then spent some quality “base building” time in our Fat Burn zone as we built up our social media tribe. Now we are ready to Build an Endurance Platform.

Let’s complete this stage of the zone training fitness analogy by discussing the Objectives, Application and “Feeling” of Zone 3 in regards to both fitness and social media.

Objective:

Fitness	Exercise longer at anaerobic intensities, improve threshold, burn more calories while still burning fat efficiently
Social Media	Start to leverage the reach from our “base building” Zone 2 tribe development while continuing to build their trust with timely, relevant content curation.

Application:

Fitness

Long moderate intervals (if interval training) and steady runs

Social Media

Let’s talk “long moderate intervals” first. These should be the long time lapses between your self-promotional broadcasts. Your tribe will expect you to promote your brand; however, they do not want you picking up the “always on” megaphone to yell “YAY ME”. Your feed should be a combination of bi-directional engagement, news and blog posts relevant to your interests, and occasional self-promotion. Even then, steer clear from faceless marketing-speak. You are taking the time to build relationships, so tailor your message to the relationships. Some people vote for ratios of 70/30 or80/20 between content curation and self-promotion. My personal ratio is probably closer to 90/10. Keeping with the interval theme, having a high-intensity spike and calling it a day will not help you build aerobic endurance. In fact, you will lose fitness over time. Having a spike in tweets or Facebook/Google+ status updates will cause you to lose that tribe that you patiently built in Zone 2.Provide suitable “intervals” between your updates. I use three techniques to optimize my intervals. I use BundlePost every morning to curate content from a mixture of blog RSS feeds, Google Alerts on topics I enjoy, and a combination of personal blog and Pulse Analytics promotion. I can quickly curate content for multiple social media profiles using exports from BundlePost that I import into HootSuite’s Bulk Scheduling. I use Buffer throughout the day to pace my updates. If I read 5 great articles in a row, I do not want them going out within a total duration of 10 minutes. Instead, I want to space them out for my tribe to enjoy. Buffer is perfect for this task…especially when curating for multiple social profiles. I even opt for the paid version because it saves me significant time versus manually scheduling in HootSuite. I periodically review my HootSuite streams (based upon Twitter lists, @Mentions and Direct Messages), Facebook wall, and Google+ stream so that I can directly engage with tribemates or Share/RT their great content. Regarding “steady runs”, stay measured and consistent. Balance out your updates throughout the day, and take a little time every day. Exercising one day per week will not build your fitness, so do not expect content curation one day per week to build your true influence.

Feeling:

Fitness

Muscles definitely feeling the work, still making it through the exercise, but starting to breathe harder and get a muscle burn

Social Media

Just like our muscles start feeling the burn, and we breathe harder while doing an aerobic workout – we are starting to feel the resource impact of our content curation. Social Media is not free. At a minimum it costs resource time, and you should consider the paid options for the inexpensive tools I suggest in this Social Fitness series.Regarding people resources, allow them to allocate time exclusively for this content curation and engagement exercise, or these resources will burn out over time.

• Did you know that both Fitness and Social Media Zone Training require good monitoring? I use a product called DigiFit for my fitness zone training, and I encourage you to review Mantis Pulse Analytics for social media monitoring.
• Do you have a guess on my social media parallel to Zone 4 – Anaerobic Endurance?

I look forward to your comments as we work through this series. If you enjoy these posts, please Stumble them to further encourage social sharing and discussion of these ideas.

Read more:

• Social Media Fitness – Base Building