How To Be Awesome On Social Media In 20 Minutes A Day

This is a guest post by Leo Widrich, co-founder of Buffer. More about him at the bottom of this post.

As sharing is predicted to absolutely explode in the coming 2012 year, many smart people have predicted a “Shareapocalypse”. Or to speak with the words of Nova Spivack, who says:

“In the Sharepocalypse hundreds (if not thousands) of online friends share content with us across various social networks, culminating in massive information overload.”

So how can we best battle this information overload out there? With a few awesome tools, I believe it can be done. A lot of great apps have emerged to organize, consume and share your content much more efficiently than before.

Here are my top pointers for you to make the most of Social Media in just 20 minutes a day:
 

5 minutes: Find the best content from your Social Networks

If you really don’t want to spend any more than 5 minutes per day to get the best content from around the web, Summify is your top tool. It pulls in all the content from your Twitter, Facebook and Google Reader stream. It then passes it through their smart algorithm and comes up with the best stories based on your reading habits.

Through this, you will always be kept up to date and get your daily dose of news straight to your inbox. With the new “on demand” stories button, you can even choose to get another summary of news, if the one you received isn’t quite right for you.

Timing: Personally I love doing this early in the morning, just when I get up.

5 minutes: Share the best content more effectively on Twitter and Facebook

Now, the worst thing that could happen, is if I were to take 5 minutes to read my great Summify summary, and then blast all the top stories out to my followers, 5 at once and flood my stream. If you still want to keep your day productive, spending as little time as possible, there are a lot of smart ways to make sharing easier for yourself.

What I like to do once I have received my social summary, is to drop those awesome articles into my Buffer. Buffer will then go ahead and post them for me at the best times to Facebook or Twitter, well spaced out over the day, and my followers will receive the updates, one at a time, easy to digest.

Timing: Filling up my Buffer with Summify stories happens early in the morning too, just after I finish reading my summary.

10 minutes: Engage, comment, like, retweet and reply

The last 10 minutes, which I normally spend in the evening, after a lot of my content has been posted and got responses, I spend engaging with my followers. It is often hard to do this in a focused way, as engaging normally happens very impulsively.

So here are a few things that I do to stay focused and get more out of my time engaging with friends and followers:

• • Reply individually to your new followers, by looking at their bio and finding something you really appreciate about what they do.
• • Pick out 3 Facebook stories, like them and comment with a sign of appreciation.
• • Answer a question someone asked in your Twitter stream, or try pointing them to someone who could possibly help.
• • Browse your stream or Twitter lists and add whatever you find interesting as retweets into your Buffer. The Twitter.com integration of Buffer makes this super easy.

Timing: I normally do this in the late afternoon, early evening. It is a great task to relax and normally a lot of fun.

Your results

If you try out this technique by just spending 20 minutes a day, you will be amazed, by how much can achieve. Doing this, has helped me increase my click rate on Tweets tremendously. Being focused when you engage also has helped me to grow my network a lot faster than I had anticipated.

Combining Summify and Buffer, will give you a Social Media power combination of sharing and finding the best content you can possibly find – in the least amount of time spent.

To track your progress, simply take a peak at your Buffer analytics. It will show you how many clicks, retweets and the reach your posts have gotten. And especially if you are swapping to Buffer to share Summify stories from now onwards, I am sure you will see a jump in mentions, replies and retweets.

Personally, after I have been a lot more focused and a lot more positive with my commenting, retweeting and replying, I saw lots of improvement on both my follower count and click rate.

Over to you now. Do you think trying this 20 minute technique for 1 week could make a difference to your Social Media results?

 
About the Author:

Leo Widrich is co-founder of Buffer, keeping the community alive and buzzing by blogging fabulous Twitter tips on the Buffer blog. He loves writing and football and he’s a super helpful guy, so do say hello! You can catch him on Twitter at @LeoWid.