One of the biggest things people grapple with when it comes to using social media professionally is how much time to spend online.
There is a minimum amount of time required to maintain your online fitness…and thankfully it’s less than required for your personal fitness! However, the actual time depends on the social media platform, your proficiency with it, your organisation and how committed you are to engaging with people in that space.
At a minimum, you should be spending 10 minutes per platform, three to four times a week just checking in. That’s making sure everything on your site/s looks as it should, checking newsfeeds and listening/observing what’s going on. Add another 10 minutes to that to share, retweet and comment (not just liking and favouriting). There’s an hour or so across your week already.
When it comes to creating content for others to like, share and comment on, like blogs for your website, creating infographics or using some great photos for your posts, this requires much more planning and time to create, edit, upload and publicise. Give yourself at least half a day a month to plan this type of content in advance. Once you’ve got it together and uploaded what you need to to your website, use a third-party social media manager to schedule it in advance. That should only take about half and hour to an hour.
If you want to know more about how to manage your time online through planning and content curation, there’s a Social Media Matters: Give Me More (intermediate) workshop happening in Dubbo on July 25 and September 2. Details on the workshops page.
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Thanks to Fitness Focus Dubbo for allowing me to record this video in their space. They are the ones who help to keep my personal fitness on track…and I’m not a person who LOVES the gym. It’s friendly staff and clients, knowledgable trainers and a well managed facility that keeps me coming back.
Kim V. Goldsmith 