If you don’t know Tim Hayden, you should. I met Tim at South by Southwest Interactive last month at an excellent social media seminar which you can read about here. Tim hosted the event and spoke. After spending some time with him, learning about his vision for the future of social media I knew I wanted him to guest blog.  He is the Chief Strategy Officer at Blue Clover Studios, where he leads their business development efforts, client strategy and directs marketing nationally and internationally. Before that, Tim was the CEO of GamePlan Marketing, an Austin-based experiential marketing agency. One of his guerrilla marketing campaigns was heralded as “The Greatest Tradeshow Marketing Stunt Ever” by the editors of MarketingSherpa. He has overseen production of Bacardi’s first social media/event marketing campaign, Dell’s first social media widget and AMD’s most-viewed online video (650K+ views). And he says that at least a few times a day, he can be found on Twitter as @TheTimHayden.

Tim, welcome to Sanera.

Time vs. Social Media

It is easy to get excited as social marketers, every day believing that “engaging” conversation is what will drive people to our websites or through our doors with an open wallet.  There is a bottomless sea of tools, social networks and applications to help us “engage” the ideal market audience.  The most commonplace of such being Twitter, Facebook, perhaps WordPress, draw our attention more than others as we are convinced that the “critical mass” is there, waiting and ready for the conversation.

A few recent articles and survey results I’ve read over the past month remind me that the “critical mass” is not always there as we are sometimes led to believe.  It has become obvious to me that I should never forsake the one constant across all of my social media aspirations to reach prospective customers and drive new sales: TIME.  Time dictates behaviors and habits, and it always will.

We are each programmed to seek the fulfillment of our needs, needs that change as the hours of the day tick away.  In other words, your ideal audience tunes into social media when and where he or she wants to tune in…when the time is right for them.  At the same time, you have better things to do with your time than to sit in front of your computer or to stare at your phone, waiting.

Whether you own a small business or are the VP of Marketing for a small chain of grocery stores, here are a few tools to keep you out of the deep end of social media and keep you timely afloat with current and prospective customers at their convenience and per your schedule:

1. MANAGE YOUR ONLINE PROFILES: Use a tool such as Seesmic Desktop for simplified management of multiple Twitter and Facebook accounts and pages.  It is an easy way to share content between both of them, and simple searches on competitors, keywords or customers are a snap.
2. SPREAD THE GOOD WORD: Use a more robust tool such as Feed Magnet to aggregate and publish content created from inside your company and from customers as the content is posted.  If someone says something nice, let the rest of the world know about it on your website!
3. LISTEN, LEARN and PROTECT YOUR NAME: The more time and money you spend on outbound marketing and communications, the more likely it is that your name will come up in online conversation.   Try a free account on Trackur to listen and hold accountable anything others say about you, your company or your customers online.

Are you balancing your time AND the time of the audience you wish to engage?

Thank you for these time saving tips Tim.

One of the greatest challenges small business owners have is managing their time. Entrepreneurs often wear multiple hats: strategic planner, supervisor, sales department, accounting and oh yes, social media marketer. Can you relate? Tim has given us three tools to help us efficiently use our social media time. What tools do you use?

Tagged as: business development, entrepreneur, march marketing madness, marketing, relationships, Social Media, twitter