A <span style="font-family: Jenna Sue, Helvetica, sans-serif;">{rawther}</span> Plucky Guide to Social Media Management, Part 1

In this day and age of "personal branding," it seems that most folks have a social media strategy. Individuals are careful to only portray a certain persona online in case an employer or potential partner stumbles across any tweets. Businesses now have the unique challenge of interacting with their customers as individuals while maintaining a brand identity. Then there are the fortunate few, like me, who are individuals AND sole proprietors and therefore are their business/brand interchangeably. Hence, why I'm attempting to add some techie tips to this here "personal" blog. ...but I digress.

For years now, I've been using HootSuite* to schedule upcoming social media posts. If you're new to HootSuite, the free account allows you to post to up to 5 social media profiles, like Google+, Twitter, Facebook, etc. It's a great tool. Lately, however, I've been tempted to make the upgrade ($10/month) to access their bulk scheduling tool. Basically, instead of sitting at my computer for an hour trying to schedule each post individually, I can create a spreadsheet of dates, times, profiles, and posts, and then just upload the whole dog-on thing. #SignMeUp

While the bulk scheduler is a great tool for some posts (ex. I post an inspirational quote every single morning on Twitter. Bulk scheduling is perfect for this purpose.), social media happens in real time for the most part. This means it doesn't make sense to be posting articles or links from 3 weeks or 3 months ago on a regular basis. Your profiles have to stay somewhat current and in real-time. Also, interacting with other people on social media is genuinely the most ROI activity you can do as an individual, business owner, or blogger. Think about how excited you are to get a notification that you have been tagged or favorited. Now imagine the reaction you get when you spread that feeling around to a targeted group of people / within a certain industry and you can see the ripple-effect at work.

To plan out your social media posts, ish gets real with a tool like HootSuite that allows you to thoughtfully and intentionally post to your profiles about topics and at times that made sense for your brand without being glued to your phone/computer 24/7. Can a girl get a holla for that??

Maybe someday, I'll dig into how to set up a social media schema that makes sense for you, whether you're an individual looking to gain followers / clout, or a business looking to interact with more customers, or even a nonprofit looking to start online fundraising and awareness efforts. ...but just maybe... :)