Jimmy Gilmore – Writer – Director

I know peo­ple who are bright, ener­getic and engaged in per­son but don’t come off that way online. They have Face­book pro­files that are never updated and Twit­ter accounts they haven’t posted to in weeks. Or worse, a blog that has gone entirely dark for months.

Sure it’s hard to keep up with but with a lit­tle plan­ning it is com­pletely pos­si­ble to keep it real online 24/7. Here are a few things you can do to plan for it:

1. Post to your blog at least weekly. Try to Tweet every­day. If you’re using Face­book for busi­ness try and do some­thing there daily. You don’t have to post every­day – com­ment­ing on other people’s posts goes a long way.
2. Exploit auto-posting fea­tures. Most blog­ging plat­forms, like Word­Press allow you to set a later pub­li­ca­tion date. If you know you’re going have a busy week, you can set it and for­get it.
3. Put time on your cal­en­der for social media activ­i­ties. Most peo­ple put other impor­tant things on their cal­en­dar but don’t bother to for social media.
4. Use mobile apps. Take a few min­utes on the train or wait­ing for a meet­ing to ham­mer out a post or send a cou­ple tweets.
5. Write non-time-sensitive mate­r­ial and leave it on the back burner. Then pull the mate­r­ial out when things get busy.
6. If you’re main­tain­ing a busi­ness pro­file don’t be shy about del­e­gat­ing all or a por­tion of the respon­si­bil­ity.  You may find one of your employ­ees is more com­fort­able in the space than you are. It can be bet­ter when some­one higher in the food chain takes respon­si­bil­ity for social media activ­i­ties but if you can’t main­tain an active pres­ence, it’s bet­ter to go ahead and delegate.

Sure, your offline exis­tence is more impor­tant than your online one – no doubt. But the two are increas­ingly inter­twined – so it makes sense to be your best both off and online.