This is a guest post by Hannah Katsman. Hannah and Hadassah Levy gave a fabulous presentation at the Kishor social media conference on Tips and Tricks for Social Media Time Management, and I asked if she would write a guest piece for this blog.

In our talk to Jewish professional women on time management and social media, we wanted to address two contradictory concerns: when it comes to social media some people don’t know where to start, while others can’t seem to stop! The concept of social media, or just learning one new platform, can be overwhelming on top of an already hectic schedule. But once you do get the hang of it, social media may eat up time needed for other important work.

No one is an expert at every platform, and it’s essential to allow a generous amount of time for learning. But once you become comfortable, you can set aside time to update status and respond to contacts. Time spent on social media should be devoted to building relationships, making connections, and answering questions.

Social media like Facebook and Twitter can be compelling and even addictive. One attraction is anticipating a response to an email, comment or status message. This anticipation keeps our adrenalin up and prevents us from focusing on more productive work. While some important discussions take place in real time, when we sense the adrenalin going up it may be a signal that it’s time to turn off the software or website. The response will wait until we get back.

Tools are important.

If you find yourself repeating a particular task, chances are that someone has invented a way of automating it.

Women, especially mothers, are used to multi-tasking. Writing a grocery list while waiting for a doctor’s appointment is an effective use of time. But when we switch between windows and tasks on the computer, our minds take time to adjust. Answering an important email makes us feel like we accomplished something, but it costs us our concentration. Frequent responses to email and status messages makes us less productive, not more.

To minimize distractions and multi-tasking, I suggested a technique called Pomodoro. Spanish for tomato, the name recalls a standard kitchen timer. Pomodoros are uninterrupted 25-minute blocks of  time. Large tasks are broken down into a number of pomodoros. For a lengthy blog article you might need four. Smaller tasks, like replying to emails or updating Facebook, can be combined into one. Tasks that come up in the middle of a pomodoro get noted and added to a future one. At the end of the day, you have a written record to analyze how you spent your time.

Other speakers emphasized a point often mentioned by Debra: To get results from social media, you need a strategy. This is the best time-management tool of all. When you sit down at the computer, keep your goals in mind. Use the tactics and platforms that generate results for your business or non-profit, and drop the rest.

Hannah Katsman (pictured) was born in the US and moved to Israel nearly 20 years ago. She writes on parenting and life in Israel at A Mother in Israel. In her newest project, Cooking Manager, she helps home cooks save time and money in the kitchen. You can find her on Twitter at @mominisrael and her fan page, Facebook.com/CookingManager.

Hadassah Levy of Jewish Ideas Daily helped prepare the talk, and designed the Powerpoint presentation.

image by ali edwards

Social media strategies take time, committed personnel and commitment. But how much time is needed? How much commitment? I’ve been thinking about how much time the staff-limited, time-limited non-profit (and what non-profit isn’t?) needs to administer a social media strategy.  Many non-profits will shy away from it entirely based on the sheer amount of work hours needed to commit without solid return on investment metrics. Below, two new frameworks address the fear of the time drain directly. They illustrate the average time your organization will spend on its social media activities. If you believe that this is still too much time, I offer a few options at the end of this post.

Put another way:

Don’t let the fear of time commitment stop your organization from its strategic thinking. Develop a social media strategy. Select the appropriate tools to use. The charts below should answer the question of how much time it will take.

Two brilliant posts have inspired this thinking:

1. Beth Kanter’s blog post entitled “How Much Time Does It Take To Do Social Media?” She asserts the following framework:

2. Nina Simon’s blog post for Museum 2.0 entitled “How Much Time Does Web 2.0 Take?” She asserts the following framework:

from How Much Time Does Web 2.0 Take? by Museum 2.0

Both assert that your time spent on social media increases as  your participation increases. Museum 2.0 frames the continuum as moving from participant to content provider to community director. Or, in Beth Kanter’s words, moving from Participant/Listener to Sharing Your Story/Creating Buzz to Community Building/Networking. They are both right.

Ultimately, how much time you put into your social media strategy will depend on what you want out of it.

If your strategy will take too much time from your staff, think about your options.  Some options for limiting that time are:

1. Reconsider whether your organization can create a different, less-time consuming initial strategy. Start with a smaller goal and figure out the payback for your organization. Look at the overall strategy as a long-term goal that you may be able to implement in steps, or after you have hired more staff.

2. Can you separate or spread social media roles among staff? Does it make sense for the fundraiser/development officer to do some of the work, a program officer to work on another, and the administrative assistant to do another task?

3. Can you subcontract some of it out? There are great consultants and independent contractors out there in the social media field. They do everything from respond to chatter about the organization online to writing blog/website content to managing online community forums.

4. Can you get an intern? College (and high school) students may have the abilities needed to complete part of your strategy. They can create and maintain social network profiles, update them, listen to online chatter about the organization, create and feed content, and more.  But BEWARE: interns leave, and their information leaves with them. This is not a permanent solution to your financial/time crunch, but rather a stop-gap measure.

Once you have invested the initial time into a social media platform, it is often less time to maintain it, especially if your strategy does not involve community building and networking. For example, once you have built a community or following, it is much less work to maintain it. Another example: once you have a focused blog purpose, creating the blog posts are simple and much less time-consuming.

So go for it! Figure out your organization’s best possible uses of social media. Then, answer the question “do I have the time to do it?” If you don’t, that’s perfectly ok. Can you retool the strategy initially? Is there another way to divide the work? Is there another strategy we can implement while we work towards our ultimate social media strategy? But most importantly, now you know what it takes to get there. Go for it!