#HowTo – How to Keep Your Social Media Channels Active in Just Minutes a Day

Do you have a hard time keeping your social media channels active and updated every day?

Here’s a quick routine for social media managers and content curators. By following it, you can keep your social media accounts active and fresh in just a few minutes a day.

And, you’ll end up with lots of great content to further develop into bigger content, like blog posts and newsletters.

Here are the basic steps. Since my company Shareist develops a platform to do all this, I’ll be illustrating with that. But I’ll also list lots of other tools you can use for each step.

1. Read
2. Capture Ideas
3. Schedule and Share to Social Networks
4. Repeat.

1. Read

This may seem obvious, but the best thing you can do to be successful as a content marketer, blogger, or a writer of any sort is to read.

You can sit there and wrack your brain for ideas for the next epic blog post, and probably come up with something mediocre that you’re not proud of. Or you can let the ideas come to you. The best way to do this is to set up a place where you have a constant stream of content to read.

Use Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. If your accounts are too cluttered for it to be concentrated enough to have good on-topic posts, set up lists in any of those networks. They all have features that allow you to group users and pages and just view them in a newsfeed or stream.

Use RSS readers. Google reader is dead, but there are lots of alternatives. Feedly is a popular service, or you can Google “Google reader replacements” for lots of suggestions.

In Shareist, we have an RSS reader built-in that you can use to follow your favorite blogs and other sources of content based on keyword.

2. Capture Ideas

ABC – Always Be Capturing. Whether you’re deliberately reading for ideas for sharing over a cup coffee in the morning, or if you are just going about your day-to-day activities, when you find something great, you need to act.

Why don’t we act? Because it is probably just a little too much work to grab the content you just found.

Set yourself up with a way to capture ideas when you get them, whether that’s a blog post, a video, a tweet, or just an idea.

There are lots of bookmarking tools, like Evernote, Pinboard.in, Delicious, Pocket, Kiipt, and others. Shareist has an inbox for your content as well, and a Chrome extension and bookmarklet to fill it up. Or you can email content into it.

Once you’ve got stuff captured, you can either share it immediately, or come back later when you do have more time and do something with it.

3. Schedule and Share to Social Networks

Now that you’ve captured some great content to share with others, you don’t need to always great blog content out of it. Some people feel like they need to only share their own stuff. Or they’re afraid that everybody has seen that great post by your favorite blogger.

Remember that your audience is not you. They’re not reading lots of blogs and monitoring twitter streams for good stuff. That’s work. They want to be spoon-fed. And even though you may have seen a video a dozen times in the past week. 90% of the people you reach with your own updates probably haven’t, and will appreciate you for showing them.

I like to follow this rule: Give. Give. Give. Give. Take.

That means give at least 4 times by posting someone else’s content before you take by promoting your own.

So now that we’re over that hangup of sharing other people’s content, let’s do it. Schedule three or four things to post throughout the day. The key is to do this with some sort of social media scheduling tool, like Hootsuite or Buffer. And yes, Shareist has this too. The benefit of doing this from a tool like Shareist is that the shared elements can also be turned into blog posts and newsletters.

4. Do it all over again

That was easy, right? Now just do it again the next day, and the next.

While you do this, reading every morning, and sharing, you’re becoming a thought leader and you’re building an audience. Before you know it, ideas will come to you for topics that you want to write about and cover in a blog post. Instead of writing lots of mediocre posts, you can focus on writing fewer blog posts and make them epic.

Follow these easy steps until they become automatic and watch your social media numbers grow.