Social Media Checklist

Written by Thomas Trumble
Posted in Social Network on November 2nd, 2009

I find that a list of tasks or goals to achieve every day or every week keep me focused rather than distracted by the myriad of possibilities online. Therefore, in order to make my social media engagement more consistent, a couple of weeks ago I put together a social media check list. This is my plan for social media tasks that I want to accomplish on a regular basis in order to increase my involvement, engagement, and become more involved with the community.

When I put together this list I used a few driving principles:

Reply more than generate my own content
Share the love with reviews and recommendations
Spread activity across several communities
Focus on the communities where I am already involved

And based on those principals I put together the following list:

Tweet 5x/ day
Respond or RT 5x/ day
Update or interact with Facebook 5x/ day
Comment on someone else’s blog 3x/ day
Blog 1x/ day (once on weekends so 6x/ week)
Bookmark on Delicious 2x/ day
Favorite or comment on a Flickr photo 2x/ day
Post to Flickr 1x/day
Respond to LinkedIn Group discussion 3x/ week
Write Tumblr post 3x/ week
Write LinkedIn recommendation 1x/ week
Post to YouTube 1x/ week
Write Yelp review 1x/ week

Counting up my responses vs original content (assuming that a comment, review or recommendation count as responses, and that both delicious bookmarks and Facebook interactions are half a response and half original content) I see a 100:78 ratio with more responses than content creation. I’d like that to be higher (with more responses) and I think that it will be over time as this gets easier.

There are 8 social media networks, plus blogging, accounted for in my list. I actually belong to a few more, but either wouldn’t count them here (like Foursquare that I’m just dipping a toe in) or that I’m really not engaged with right now (like StumbleUpon and Digg). That too should expand over time.

I haven’t set goals for this yet, the value is in the process, but there are some metrics that I am watching.