Seven Ways to Manage Social Media When You’re Out of the Office

About this time last week, that was me, on the right, covered with sand and watching the waves.

I tried to unplug as much as possible — it’s the one vacation I’ll have this year. If you can get to a beach from where you live, you kind of owe it to yourself to embrace the culture while you’re there. Growing up in the Midwest, the idea of having an ocean a half a day’s drive away is still really novel to me.

Being an entrepreneur means never taking a day off, or so I understand. So here’s what I did to appear to be in my office when I was really catching some rays at the beach:

1. I wrote blog posts for almost every day of the week I’d be gone and scheduled them using WordPress so they’d publish automatically.
2. My blog posts automatically update Twitter when the publish, so that audience was covered as well.
3. I used my phone to tweet, retweet and to share information (in fact, at one point, a follower who knew I was on vacation told me to quit tweeting and BE on vacation for goodness sake’s).
4. I updated Facebook from my phone.
5. I scheduled tweets, using TweetDeck so blog posts would get the same amount of traffic as if I were managing them from my desk.
6. I’m promoting two upcoming workshops, so I made sure registration links were going out via the Social Trinity (Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter) at least once a day.
7. I continued to read others’ content, liking, sharing and commenting in the hour or so I allowed myself to work each day.

How do you manage your “out of office” time?

Upcoming workshops:  Social Media Summer School and Don’t Be a Weiner: How to Use Twitter Like a Professional