The number one reason clients come to us is because they either don't have the time to handle social media or they don't have the knowledge—usually a little bit of both. Quite often they jump into social media and think that devoting five minutes a day to it will net results, which is just not the case... at least not at first. Once you have devoted significant time to learn the basic ins and outs of how the most popular channels work, you can maybe get by every now and then with spending five minutes a day on your social media management, but not very often.

So how do you spend the time you need without social media management being the only thing you do during the day?

Routine

A solid social media management routine is the third in my series of tips. Just like many things, the more routine you make something, the more natural it becomes to you. It's like losing weight because you're exercising. If you commit to yourself that part of your routine is to walk for 30 minutes every day at 6pm, pretty soon you don't think twice about doing it. It's just part of your day!

1. Use a social media management system for posting. I, like many professionals, use Hootsuite, but the most important thing is to find the one that works for you. Some people like Sprout, and some larger companies prefer a more enterprise platform like Radian6. The biggest advantage that these platforms have is the ability to house many of your social media sites in one space. From here, you're able to quickly see what messages are going out via a dashboard. And not having to log in and out of multiple sites will save you time. One thing that I'd like to point out—with many of these sites, you can post the same message across all social media sites. However, just because you can does not mean that you should.

2. Set a timer – and a limit – to how much time you spend. Egg timers. They're not just for cooking eggs. If you don't have an egg timer handy, just go to a site like Rescue Time or MinutesPlease, and from there all you have to do is enter the sites you want to limit yourself to and the amount of time. Another thing that I find helpful for myself is to write out a schedule. From 9-9:15, you spend time on Facebook, 9:15 - 9:30 on Twitter, etc. Then you can circle back around midday or at lunch to make sure there is nothing pressing that you need to attend to, and then once more before you leave for the day. Discipline and routine are great things.

3. Use reports and analytics to see where your time is best spent - There was a time when on my personal blog,  I was this close to dropping Facebook from the sites that I promoted on. And then I looked at my analytics, and as much as Facebook may frustrate me with its constantly changing algorithms and antics, it is still the #1 traffic source to my site outside of Google. This is another place where using a social media management tool like Hootsuite comes in handy—it has built-in analytics. However, if you want to get a more in-depth view, you'll want to use a tool such as SocialReport.