Daily Social Media Actions

First, before presenting the daily to-do list it's important to understand these things needn't be performed all at one time. You don't need an hour first thing in the morning. These tasks can be tackled in those stolen moments throughout your day when you find yourself waiting on something else: waiting for a meeting to start, waiting on a friend for lunch, waiting on a conference call for the speaker/host to arrive, on your morning commute, or over your morning coffee. You can even do them at night when watching TV or while you use one of the machines at the gym.

However you decide to fit these actions in, you want to do the following on a daily basis:

• Respond to all comments on your social media and blog posts. Don't just like them. Use the comment as the first step for communication. It's a way to reach out and show the social media algorithms that you and your audience are engaging with one another.
• Post something of value for your audience and use a lead-in. The lead-in should invite further engagement. For articles, the lead-in can tell them what you think they'll get from it or ask a question about it. For images, ask a question or invite them to share their own. For video, use a teaser like "I would love this if it happened to me."
• Comment on a blog post, post to a group or answer a question on a site other than your own.
• Follow at least 2 people who could be helpful to your business. This means someone who falls into your ideal customer demographic or someone who can teach you something that will be beneficial to your business. Comment on one of their posts to begin establishing a relationship.

If you have more time, just do more of these activities.

Weekly Social Media Activities

Social media is not an exact science. While there are best practices, until you start experimenting with posting, you won't know which ones apply to your audience. For that reason, there's a lot of analysis required to understand what you should do more of and what isn't working. So...

On a weekly basis you want to make time for:

• Noting the details of your most popular post. What was it about, where was it published, at what time, and on what day? These important factors can help you better understand what works for your audience and when they are most likely to engage with you.
• Schedule posts for the week. Yes, you do want to interact with people on social media in an unplanned way but you should also post at strategic times and experiment with off-business hours.
• Check Google Analytics to see which social media site refers the most traffic to you. That should become your primary post location (outside of your own space).
• Clean your follower lists. Are any of your follower's bots? Are any spamming you with sales messages? Remove those who fall into these categories. No reason to have inflated following numbers for people/bots that will never buy from you.
• Look over new followers and interact with those who are in your ideal customer demographic or those who can add value to your business.
• Look for good content and add it to your content file for future use.

Social media, like any other relationship, takes time. It's the long game that matters. Look for ways to add value for your followers every day. If you give more of yourself, you'll get more in return.