Social Media marketing is still very much in it’s infancy and one of the questions many people ask me is how much time they should spend on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter.
My answer is normally something like “how long is a piece of string?” but of course that isn’t very helpful. The key to success in regards to social media is keeping things social and to always remember that you get out what you put in (eventually).
There’s no quick fix solution or magic tool which will get you thousands of followers overnight. In fact anything claiming to do such a thing is certainly worth steering clear of.
This week’s marketing campaigns for photographers is designed to help business owners manage their social media time more effectively.
45 minutes of daily social media marketing
What would happen if you dedicated 45 minutes a day to social networking?
Would 45 minutes a day be less time than you already spend on social networks?
Here’s what you can do in 45 minutes
- Schedule 5 tweets for the day
- Schedule 5 Facebook updates and links for the day
- Find and follow 10 relevant people
- RT 5 tweets from your followers
- Reply to any @mentions and/or comments
- Personally welcome new followers – not DMs
How you do this…
The 9am schedule session – 15 mins
Using Hootsuite-
- Schedule 5 tweets for the day
- Schedule 5 Facebook updates and links for the day
Throughout the day
I’d recommend three different check in times throughout the day. Stick to these times and try not to be tempted by email alerts or mobile notifications. Although these are a great way to keep an eye on what is happening it’s very rare that comments will need to be acted on immediately.
These can be done on mobile devices, I use both the official twitter iPhone app and the hootsuite app
- 11am comment and @mention check – 5 mins
- 1pm comment and @mention check – 5 mins
- 3pm comment and @mention check – 5 mins
5pm or 9am follow – 15 minutes
I don’t use any auto follow tools so I manually look at every new follower to see if I want to follow them back.
This has many benefits the biggest being that you’re not following a lot of robots. Twitter is a social tool so it’s important to preserve that essence
- Follow back relevant people manually
- Find and follow 10 relevant people
- Use Tools like Twitter’s Who to Follow and directories like We Follow
What else?
On average you’ll be sharing about 15-25 tweets a day
When to schedule your tweets
- 10:00
- 11:30
- 13:00
- 14:30
- 16:00
When to schedule your Facebook messages
- 9:30
- 11:00
- 12:30
- 14:00
- 15:30
Tracking
Use Hootsuite tracking analytics for scheduled twitter and Facebook posts. The premium analytics is so good you could pretty much do all of your social media tracking from one place. Custom reports and Google analytics are also available
Keep to the set times as this will help you analyse your stats. It’ll also help keep you on track! With all social media there’s always the danger of spending too little as well as too much time.
Use Klout to get a twitter score. Klout will also tell you some interesting information about yourself.
Thoughts about this campaign
After a while you could easily cut the 45mins down to much less time. For example scheduling the 5 tweets and 5 Facebook messages took me less than 10mins but using HootSuite’s bulk scheduling features you could have a whole database of tweets set to post and different times throughout the week.
You could also have a scheduling day but the main reason I like to suggest doing this daily is that you can keep it topical.
It’s also important to remember that this campaign does need to be adapted to your business or website. This works well for sites like PhotoCreative365 and Current Photographer as together we have over 1500 published articles. It’s fair to say that we’re not short of an archive of content to share.
It’s also worth pointing out that sharing so many Facebook links might start annoying your fans so one slight chance I’d sugget is to reduce the amount of Facebook sharing to every other day and perhaps only share a couple of links at a time.
With Twitter on the other hand you could always increase the number of links you share without anyone really noticing…… or more importantly clicking the un-follow.
As with all of these marketing campaigns the key is to experiment experiment experiment…..good luck!
Try this for a week and let us know how you get on!
This is the twelfth in our series looking at different marketing campaigns for photographers.
Also in this series:
- Win a Car!
- Gift Vouchers
- The Facebook Group Tag
- #archiveday
- Refer a Friend
- The Exhibition
- The Humble Keyring
- Getting Press
- Baby Passport Pictures
- The Wedding venue blog page
- The Wedding Venue Video
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Michael has been working as a photographer for the last ten years. In that time he has shot over 100,000 peoples’ portraits and worked in four different continents. In 2001 Michael graduated with a degree in photography from Manchester Metropolitan University.