Smart Answers June 8, 2010, 4:55PM EST

Stop Wasting Time on Social Media

BNI.com's Ivan Misner explains why small business owners aren't getting the most out of such tools as Facebook and Twitter, then offers tips

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Entrepreneurs are spending too much time on online social media and have unrealistic expectations about results, says Ivan Misner, founder and chairman of business networking organization BNI.com. Misner, author of 10 books that include his latest, Networking Like a Pro (Entrepreneur Press, January 2010), spends a lot of time teaching small business owners how to market online. He passed along some tips in a recent interview with Smart Answers columnist Karen E. Klein. Edited excerpts of their conversation follow.

Karen E. Klein: Most entrepreneurs know they should be using social media, but beyond establishing a Facebook page and a Twitter account, they're kind of lost. What are they doing wrong?

Ivan Misner: There are three problems. They're spending too much time on it, they don't understand how to leverage their time, and they anticipate immediate results, which they're not going to get.

Here's what happens: You go to LinkedIn or Facebook and you read a comment and it takes you to another link and now you're on YouTube, watching someone's video. Pretty soon something weird happens in the space-time continuum and you look up and you've lost two hours.

How should they be leveraging that time?

There are great services they should be using like Ping.fm, Seesmic.com, and Hootsuite.com. You can go there and it ties all your social media together. In other words, they're probably logging on to their Facebook account and going to their page and typing in their message, and then going to Twitter and LinkedIn and doing the same thing. It kills time. If you use sites like this, you write one message and they ping everything so you're not spending 20 minutes to do what you can in three minutes.

Is it okay to post the same content to all your networking sites?

I think it's alright to put the same content on most of them, perhaps with some variation. The key is that you've got to be putting good content up. If all you do is say, "Hey I'm at Starbucks getting a latte," nobody's going to follow you.

You need meaty content, but occasionally a personal touch is good. I was in Big Bear on my deck one time and a bald eagle flew 20 feet above me. I happened to have my camera on hand and I took a shot of it and posted it on Facebook. That was one of the biggest responses I've ever gotten.

You can't go wrong with animals.

It starts a dialogue and that's what social media is all about. That's also why you should respond to some of the comments you get. Say, "thanks," or "that's a good point," or "here's something I forgot." Engage personally—not with every comment, but with at least some of them.

All of this costs very little, but it is time consuming, isn't it?

Here's what I recommend: Set aside a certain time each day, and don't make it prime working hours. Do this at night while you're watching American Idol, during a commercial break. Maybe on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays you post your messages, make comments, and add content. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, do your friend requests.

When I started doing this, I would take bite-sized pieces of my books or articles and make up 50 or 100 of them in 140 characters or less. Then over three or four weeks, I'd Tweet them out or put them on Facebook. I schedule Tweets at CoTweet.com, so the same tweet goes out every six or eight hours when it's in the middle of the day where my clients are on the other side of the world.