Am I Wasting Time at my Job?
Posted by krisforinger on July 11, 2012
As I mentioned the first day of class, I currently work for a small environmental non-profit in Annapolis, MD. I was hired to help with a variety of communications strategies, one of them being social media. Before me, my organization had outsourced the social media which basically consisted of pre-scheduled posts to Twitter whenever there was a website update (Example: New Blog: Chesapeake Bay Crabs are ver….http://www.hdtyb.com) Yea. #Boring.
While I manage the social media, I do have a lot of other things I have to accomplish in my position, so I have to be mindful of how much time I spend on the social media aspect of my job. (Unlike my real life where I can sit down and get lost in Facebook and Pinterest for hours before realizing I just spent 4 hours looking at recipes and pictures of my friend’s dog.)
I found this article about social media time management, very timely from our discussion on Monday, where we talked about many of the different social media tools available. As shown by some reactions, it can often become overwhelming when you see what is out there, but you have to keep in mind that you will probably only use about 3-5 of these tools when managing social media. One, because you really should only be where your audience is, and they aren’t using everything. Two, you couldn’t possibly manage your company’s presence on every single one.
For my work, I have been able to narrow down our active social media presence to Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Youtube and our blog. I would guess that I probably spend about 15-20 hours a week (as recommended in the article) on these four tools, and am still able to manage everything else I do.
What was helpful for me about this article were the suggested other tools that I could be using that may not add too much time to my schedule, like Linkedin. While we have a company page on Linkedin, I don’t engage many people on that platform and it might be interesting to explore.
Does anyone else manage social media for their work? What tools do you use?
AU MA Social Media 
AlanaR said
Great article, very timely! Thanks for sharing.
I’ve recently been asked to develop a social media strategy for my office, and I’d like to hear more about how you were able to narrow down your active social media presence to the 5 sites you mention. Did you send out surveys to your audience? Spend weeks sifting through FB, Twitter, Youtube, etc. monitoring where people were talking about your company? Did you use a site that did that for you?
Any best practices you’ve got and would like to share, i’m all ears!