Is Social Media Just a Time Suck for Small Business, Real Estate Agents & Mortgage Brokers?

Social media time management is an ever-evolving environment. New tools are coming out every day, and it can be hard to keep up. Furthermore, many of us, including myself, have wondered whether all the hard work will pay off. Bottom line: Leveraging social media correctly in conjunction with the rest of your marketing/business plan will increase your revenue; I saw my income increase exponentially! I will give you five tested tips and tools that will help you efficiently manage your social media.

But first just a few stats for those data-driven agents out there:

• 50 percent of small-business owners reported getting new customers from social media. (CrowdSpring)
• Nearly 80 percent of active Internet users visit social networks and blogs. (Nielsen)
• 91 percent of online American adults (approx. 129 million) access some form of social media each month. (Experian)
• According to an analysis of 4,200 companies by the business consulting giant McKinsey Global Institute, social technologies stand to unlock from $900 billion to $1.3 trillion in value.

Now, on to the goodies.

1) You must be an “iAgent” — and by that I mean, an agent of the Internet. Mobility is key. You need to be able to work from anywhere from your “virtual office.” Whether it be on your laptop, smartphone or tablet, you must be on one of them. The operating system is your choice: Droid or iPhone or Blackberry. All have App stores where you can find Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Foursquare, etc.

2) Dashboards. Having all your accounts in one place really is a time saver. I use HootSuite and simply love it! I manage many of my accounts from this one platform (desktop and mobile). There are also others out there like TweetDeck, CoTweet, and Seesmic.

Now, if a dashboard is too overwhelming, try connecting some of your accounts together. For instance, you can use Facebook Connect to connect your Twitter account to your Facebook profile so when you post to Facebook, your posts will feed automatically to your Twitter stream.

And vice versa, you can go into your Twitter account and connect your Facebook profile. INSIDER TIP: Create a personalized #hashtag so you can build an audience around a specific theme, event or discussion topic, and then add that stream to your dashboard.

3) Create a posts bin. It is a very simple tool that many agents don’t think about. When you come across good content to share, save it for later in the posts bin. So, if you have writer’s block or have been busy with customers, you will have ready-made content.

4) Integrate a social media daily checklist. Go here for a great one (and free) viaHubSpot to download and personalize. Simple, easy and efficient.

5) Take advantage of alerts apps and tools that go straight to your phone and/or email. Depending on your preference, set them up for daily or weekly timing. My favorites are TweetAlarm, TweetBeep, Facebook Page Weekly Insights Alerts, Repinly, Pinterest Weekly, and Unroll.me.

I hope these tips and tools help you. No more time “suckage” for you and if you need a little help, email us for a free consultation. maria@internet-marketinginabox.com

The Reframing Matrix - Creativity tools from MindTools.com

The Reframing Matrix - Creativity tools from MindTools.com

A Reframing Matrix is a simple technique that helps you to look at business problems from a number of different viewpoints. It expands the range of creative solutions that you can generate.

Things look different when you change perspective.

© iStockphoto

The approach relies on the fact that different people with different experience approach problems in different ways. What this technique helps you to do is to put yourself into the minds of different people and imagine the solutions they would come up with.

We do this by putting the question to be asked in the middle of a grid. We use boxes around the grid for the different perspectives. This is just an easy way of laying the problem out, so if it does not suit you, change it.
We will look at two different approaches to the reframing matrix – you could, however, use this approach in many different ways.

The 4 Ps Approach

This relies on looking at a problem from different perspectives within a business. The 4 Ps approach looks at problems from the following viewpoints:

• Product perspective: Is there something wrong with the product?
• Planning perspective: Are our business plans or marketing plans at fault?
• Potential perspective: If we were to seriously increase our targets, how would we achieve these increases?
• People perspective: Why do people choose one product over another?

An example of this approach is shown below:

The 'Professions Approach'

Another approach to using a reframing matrix is to look at the problem from the viewpoints of different specialists. The way, for example, that a doctor looks at a problem would be different from the approach a civil engineer would use. This would be different from a sales manager's perspective.
The idea of the Reframing Matrix was devised by Michael Morgan in his book 'Creating Workforce Innovation '.