How did you that so fast? Social media, quickly

My friend Torri recently dropped me a line on Facebook asking me to do a quick promotion for a Stick It 2 Cancer event. About a half-hour later, I responded to her via the same channel saying that I had:

• Posted the event on my Facebook wall
• Posted the event on Google+
• Sent reminders to everyone on LinkedIn to whom I had sent prior invitations
• Set up a drip campaign on Twitter across three accounts
• Linked StickIt2Cancer.com from my cancer blog

Torri’s response “Holy crap man, how did you do all that so fast???”

I started to write up a quick response to her, and decided there was enough material for a blog post. So here we are.

Here’s a few keys:

• Planning – social media sites are sticky, and can suck you in and keep you there for a long time. Decide what you want to do, drop in and do it, and then bail out.
• Limit interaction – This is related to planning, but a corollary. Limit your personal interaction to activities that forward the goals you set in planning. You don’t need to be there all the time – you have to seem like you’re there all the time.
• Notifications – Use notifications to help you limit interaction but still be responsive when you need to be. Avoid, however, the desire to respond to every notification.
• Be offline – If you have to create a volume of content, do it offline. I can very quickly knock out a bunch of tweets or a couple blog posts if I’m not trying to do them live on the site with other activity going on around me. Shut off your e-mail and other distractions, too.
• Use technology – Use technology both to monitor social media and to post campaigns on it. For example, the drip campaign I set up for Torri will continue to run through the event, tweeting across several existing Twitter accounts every four hours or so via SocialOomph, one of the few tools I recommend purchasing. The postings I did on Facebook and G+  were done in one fell swoop using the Start Google Plus browser extension for Chrome. The link on my cancer blog was done, of course, using WordPress, which I use for just about every website I build these days. The monitoring will all be done using notifications and Tweetdeck for Desktop. (Don’t use the phone app, it’s too much of a resource pig.)