Once you have a number of social media clients’ under your belt, it is very important that you are able to efficiently manage the social media campaigns for each client. There is no point in having the freedom of working for yourself as a social media manager if you have to spend 12 hours each day trying to get all of the work done for your clients.

However this need not be the case, with the right strategy, you can easily manage all of the social media work for multiple clients in 30 minutes or less each day. One of the first things you’re going to need to do is choose some tools to help you manage everything.

One of the big factors for using social networks successfully is to “be there” when people are online, looking at their own stream of information. Because the information on these sites is like a stream, a post you make now will be pushed off of people’s feed anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours later.

In order to reach as many people as possible, you need to be posting and interacting at various times of the day. And that’s where a lot of people stumble when it comes to doing this efficiently. They feel like they have to “be there” off and on all day, so they keep their browser or other client software open all the time, creating an ongoing stream of interruptions.

It’s much more effective to use a tool that will let you schedule updates at various times throughout the day. You can queue up a bunch of things all at once, schedule them to drip out over the course of 12 to 24 hours, and as far as the people following you are concerned, you’re active all day long. Meanwhile, you’ve spent your 30 minutes to manage it all, and then shut down the website or the client software, and moved on to more productive tasks.

Using lists or groups to manage the people you’re following will also help you reduce the time you spend, particularly when it comes to engaging with other people. Over time, you’ll find that there are certain people you follow who are constantly providing good information and stuff that is worth passing along to your readers.

Hopefully you’ll become one of those people for your followers.
When you sit down to spend your 30 minutes on the social networks, those lists are the first things you should read. Find any posts that you want to re-post for your readers, respond to anything where you can add to or start a discussion and so on.

Let’s look at a sample action plan for accomplishing this.

First, you’ll want to choose a method of managing your social networks. The most effective way to do it is to use one of the software clients that let you manage various networks all from one place.

First we’ll look at the tools you’ll use to manage your primary networks. The two most widely-used clients are the following:

Each has advantages as well as disadvantages.

Pros:

Scheduled updates

Desktop and mobile versions available

Create custom searches and other filters

Cross-platform compatibility (Windows/Mac/Linux)

Supports multiple accounts

Free

Cons:

White on black interface is hard to read for some people

Runs on Adobe Air, which can use a lot of resources on your computer

No ping.fm support

Pros:

Scheduled updates

Mobile versions available

Create custom searches and other filters

Web based, so works on any operating system

Supports multiple accounts

Built-in URL shortener with analytics

Supports ping.fm

Cons:

No dedicated desktop app

Some features only available on paid accounts

Sheer number of features can be a bit overwhelming at first

Like many competitive products, these are constantly updating and adding features to catch up with or get ahead of one another. Which is good for us users, but it can lead to “feature envy” if the one you choose falls behind one of the others in some way.

Switching back and forth isn’t a good idea if you want to keep your time investment to a minimum, however. Choose one based on your current needs, get it set up for your particular action plan and then stick with it.

Of the two, Hootsuite is probably the most powerful. Being able to schedule your updates is critical to this process of minimizing the time you spend on your social networks.

Tweetdeck also allows scheduling, but because it runs on Adobe Air, it does use more resources than the others, which will be particularly noticeable if you’ve got a little bit older computer with less CPU speed and memory.

It does come down to personal preference to some degree though, so it’s worth testing each of them before you make your final decision.

And keep in mind that some of the features Hootsuite offers are only available on their “Pro” plan, which has a monthly fee. Which is well worth it, if those features are useful to you.

Once you’ve got everything configured properly, here is the basic workflow you’re going to follow:

Set a timer for 30 minutes.

Collect any updates you want to post yourself such as new blog posts, new articles you’ve submitted elsewhere, offers you want to make, interesting or helpful posts you’ve come across, etc. A good way to keep track of any interesting links you come across during the day is to bookmark them with a site like Delicious using a tag like “to post” or something unique that will let you find them quickly when you need them.

Open up your chosen social media client.

Check for direct messages and mentions on Twitter, and respond where appropriate. And maybe block where appropriate as well!

Scan through your “brand searches” column to see if you’re being mentioned anywhere, and if so respond to those posts when appropriate.

Scan through your main news feed for each site, or your list columns if you have specific people you want to give more focus. Re-post, reply or comment on those posts that you feel are worthwhile.

If you have a “master” feed from all the people you’re connected to, and have time left in your schedule, scan through that list and look for anything you can comment on or reply to. This is how you’ll build new relationships, so if you don’t “know” the person, it can be a good way to connect.

Make a couple of posts from the list of things you want to share and then start scheduling the rest to post automatically over the rest of the day. You might want to schedule multiple posts for some things, like new blog posts or promotions of any sort. This will give them a better chance of being noticed by more people, as they come and go throughout the day.

Initially, this might feel a little foreign, especially the scheduling part, since part of the draw of social media is its immediacy. But once you’ve been at it for a few days, it will get easier and you’ll probably find there are tweaks or changes you want to make to the workflow to best suit your needs.

For example, you might prefer to break it up into two 15 minute sessions at different times of the day, rather than a single 30 minute session.

There are no “rules” here, so do whatever works best for you.

Before we finish off, let’s just look at a few ways to generate ideas for things you can post.

First, look for the people you are connected to. You’ll find certain people who post interesting stuff on a regular basis, and those updates can be a great way to find stuff to re-post yourself. This is essentially the definition of how things go viral.

Next, when you come across an interesting site as part of your day, make note of it. Don’t stop what you’re doing to go and post it then, but bookmark the link or take note of it somehow so you can pull it up quickly during your social networking time.

If you want to stick to a particular market, you can use Google Alerts to automatically send you updates by email, based on keyword searches in the market. This is a great way of finding relevant content to post for your clients and these updates generally have several links you can use as source material for your posts.

Keep an eye on industry news in your market and even more general news topics. These can be great sources of interesting stuff for your updates.

Your own resources – things like your blog posts, promotional offers, guest posts you’ve written for another blog, articles you’ve submitted to sites like Ezinearticles.com, etc.

Whenever you create some new content somewhere or your client has, plan to post several updates about it within the next few days. And once in a while, revisit some of your older posts – especially the more popular ones – so newer people in your network can be exposed to them.

Finally, a comment about promotional updates. There’s nothing wrong with posting an update about your clients’ latest product, sale or any other type of promotion. It might even be extremely valuable to some of your network, if it’s something useful to them that they hadn’t heard of before.

But restrain yourself from posting too many promotional updates and not enough “content” updates. If people see that every other update you post is a sales pitch, it’s quite likely they will either tune you out or stop following you entirely.
Treat your social network like you would a group of people in person at a party and it will be much more effective for you and for your clients.

After all, the more effective your efforts are for your clients, the more money they will be happy to pay you!