Many business owners know they should have a presence on social media, but the biggest concern for most people is the amount of time running a successful account can take.

It is true that for social media to work, you need to invest time into it, but it doesn’t have to take over your life, or your business!

We’ve put together a handy guide for small businesses using Twitter, which will help you to maximise your time and productivity on the site.

1) Get a strategy

There is no greater time-suck than ad-hoc social media marketing. If you’re jumping on and off, posting randomly and not setting a clear structure it’s more than easy to end up spending hours and hours online. Having a strategy means you’ve thought about it, though about what you want to get out of it and how you’re going to do it. It allows you to concentrate on reaching set goals by structuring your social media output.

2) Schedule content

Once your strategy is in place you’ll know what you want to tweet and when in advance. This means you don’t need to wait to do it. There are plenty of free online tools that allow you to schedule tweets to go out when you want. This means you will still have content going out on your account and it’s less likely to fall inactive.

3) Set some time aside to follow others

You’ll need to check for latest trends and people you want to connect with but having a structured time-slot in place for this will stop it spiralling out of control.

4) Remember to monitor

It’s a good idea to get the Twitter app on your phone, so it will notify you when someone replies or interacts with your content. This way you can reply to them as well without leaving it too long and making it seems as though you are not listening to the people you connect with online.

5) Measure your success

As part and parcel of your strategy, measuring success is crucial to refine your activity and understand what works for your business and what doesn’t.

What do you think? Let us know in the comment box below.

By Harriet Thacker