Boiling the ocean takes a lot of time, effort and resources, so don’t try. None of us have time to get involved in everything, so choose activities that are applicable to your business or career and factor in whether you’ll have time to do them well.
Just because Facebook and Twitter are there, doesn’t mean you have to do them. If you’re looking for personal exposure for your expertise to advance your career, try keeping updated profiles in places like LinkedIn. Also consider online locations that allow you to pull in information from other activities you do–for example, LinkedIn allows you to add your blog postings and SlideShare presentations, as well as other online content, to your profile. Take advantage of these integrated platforms. What’s great about LinkedIn, and other types of online integrated profile locations like this, is that you set it up and don’t have to worry about it. It continues to pull in the feeds from the other locations on it’s own. Also, your profile won’t change continually, so just be sure to review it periodically to correct items or add.
Social media sites can offer terrific opportunities for increasing your business or generating awareness about your products/services or personal skills, but some are time suckers! I love Twitter and Facebook, but they do require a time commitment. There are ways of pulling in content automatically to keep them updated and looking robust, but be sure you aren’t adding auto-content updates just to add something new.
If you really won’t have the time to participate in these kinds of online discussions and content posting locations, don’t do it. It’s better to choose 1 thing to do that you actually have the time, interest and resources to do well, than to setup accounts and pages that will end up being empty or just have stale old info.
If you offer a service or product that people can write reviews on, consider choosing a location or two, such as Yelp, and implementing a standard process to request people to write reviews. For example, if you offer a service that you invoice your clients for after completion, consider including a request for them to write a review on Yelp when you send the invoice. It’s always better to include a link that people can quickly click through on than something in the snail mail, but however you do it, just do it!
Just some quick food for thought for the day!
