January 30, 2013

Business 2 Community

Cutting Time Without Cutting Corners - Social Media Efficiency

By: Dana VanDen Heuvel

The following is an excerpt. To read the full story visit the Business 2 Community website.

It’s inevitable. If you’re like most goal-seeking humans (actually, humans are unique goal seeking, it’s how our brains are wired, but I digress) looking to up your game in 2013, you’re likely looking for opportunities to become more efficient in all areas of your life. If you’ve been working in social media for any amount of time, you know that it takes time. In fact, it can take a lot of time. Perhaps much more than you originally anticipated it taking. Naturally, as you set goals for the coming year (or coming week), you inevitably want to get more efficient with your social media. However, the question of how you cut time without cutting corners is a likely hurdle that you’re going to have to jump as there are many ways to cut time, but not all of them are going to give you the same quality results. They may be just cutting corners, so to speak.

So, what are some of the ways that companies have cut time, without cutting corners? Here are a few:

Pre-write your content plan

Using a variety of techniques, but basically relying on the power of batching, you can save considerable time, increase the overall quality of your work, and improve the cycle time for actually writing and posting content throughout the year. Further, you’ll be saving time on account of the focus, without distractions, that batching provides. If you have an enterprise-wide social media strategy, this can save you considerable time and money in your overall social media (and content marketing, and thought leadership) efforts. This is all based on the research by Gloria Mark, a professor at the University of California at Irvine, who found that the technology workers she studied would make it, on average, only 11 minutes into a project before being distracted. It then took 25 minutes to return to the task post-distraction. (via/A Day Without Distraction: Lessons Learned from 12 Hrs of Forced Focus by Cal Newport)


Cutting Time Without Cutting Corners - Social Media Efficiency