Music. Marketing. Social Media.

Social media is a lot of work. Anyone in the industry will tell you the same thing, and there are a number of posts by people far more eloquent than I about this very subject. Check here, here and here for starters. Notice the constant mentions of “time”, “time consuming” and “measuring”.

For me, there is the full-time job, the 50ish blogs I subscribe to, Twitter, my personal blog, this blog and various new media and music events around the New York City area.

For being so “easy”, keeping up with social media is really hard work.

My Activity

I’m active on Twitter daily, and I set aside a few nights a week to read (and usually draft, though more on that later) blog posts as well as catch up on everything I’ve missed throughout the week.

I also end up checking Facebook/MySpace/LinkedIn more frequently than once a week; though it is a priority to check them all once a week at the same time to make sure I haven’t missed anything.

The one thing I haven’t mentioned is my blogging activities.  I’m the type to think on the go quite frequently, which is why I enjoy living in a city like New York so much.  It’s not uncommon for me to use the WordPress application on my iPhone to jot a few quick notes while on the go, saving these thoughts for later when I have more time to flesh them out into a full post.

I’ve found it important to map out which networks and social sites I want to maintain a presence on, as well as how I plan on being active on those networks.

The same questions can be used to plan your own activities in social media.

Planning My Activity

Here’s how I started:

Presence

• Where (what networks and sites) do I currently participate?
• Where do my contemporaries or audiences participate?
• Do these sites make sense for me?

Planning

• How active do I want to be in social media?
• What sites tie into my objectives (for me, this is personal, for you it’s probably business)?
• How can I manage this activity without losing my mind?

Many social media professionals have shared their own strategies and tips and a few are linked here for your enjoyment.

How do you handle your social media activity?

Tags: best practices, planning, social media, social networking

This entry was posted on Monday, September 14th, 2009 at 10:00 am and is filed under best practices, social networking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.