Social media should be an integral part of your business marketing plan and when you are doing it yourself, it can be easy to get swept away in the enormity of at all.  You might have several accounts:  Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn and many more.  It can be all too easy to lose track of time.  Before you know it, three hours have gone by and you haven’t worked on your business at all.  Just social media marketing.

It’s true.  It is a lot of work.  Social media marketing involves much more than just setting up your pages and emailing a few friends to follow while placing a few posts here and there.  It involves communicating with people, starting dialogues and getting people involved.

For the small business owners who market themselves, I suggest time-blocking your social media.  Choose one hour of the day, preferably the morning hours.  From 8-9 would be a good start.  Limit your social media activity to just this hour.  If you receive an email on a new follower, or new mention or comment after this, leave it be.  Don’t rush to click on the link to interact.  Each time you do so, you lose focus on your more important responsibilities, which is your business.  If you need to, give yourself an additional half hour at the end of the day to catch up on social media.  What you don’t want to do is interrupt your day by continually checking on your social media accounts.  Time blocking is a very important tool to learn and use.

A great social media manager, and one of considerable popularity, is HootSuite.  You can manage an unlimited amount of accounts from this product for a very low monthly fee of only $5.99 per month.  A manager such as this can bring down the time you spend logging in and out of various social media profiles.