Social media is a great tool for public figures and the public relations field.
While mass media -- TV, newspapers, radio and the internet -- can reach incredible amounts of people, it's a one-way message. There's no dialogue, no feedback, no interaction.
Social media like Twitter make it personal. They make it social. You can connect with the press and public in ways that mass media simply can't let you do.
But how do you know when those connections are good versus bad?
Maximizing Twitter
Twitter is especially challenging. If you're a public figure, you'll probably have hundreds, if not thousands, of followers on Twitter.
Unless you have Twitter technopowers that I have never witnessed, it's hard to know when people start following you and clicking on your links, and equally hard to know when and why people decide to unfollow you.
Annoying your audience is a bad idea. Reporters rely more and more on Twitter to break news and get short quotes from public figures. If you send out too many tweets, or break unwritten rules, you may not know until it's too late that a reporter or editor isn't getting your tweets.
Now a growing body of tools is coming onto the scene to help you manage social media better.
TweetEffect is a free tool that analyzes your tweets to see when you gained -- or lost -- followers.
This is a huge help, with so much of social media and public relations based on anecdotes, tradition and guesswork rather than science.
When to Publish Blog Posts and Tweets
There's also new science on when to tweet or put up blog posts.
Hubspot has charted when people actually read blogs or retweet things.
Just like it's smart to pitch reporters and editors mid-morning, that happens to look like the best time to post to your blog and sent tweets.
This makes sense: earlier in the morning, they're getting ready for work and driving. Around noon, they're having lunch. Afternoons are for finishing things up, then they're driving home and having dinner.
After dinner, actually, traffic spikes back up. But not as much as in the morning.
But how do you use this? After all, it takes time to generate quality content, or to remember to post on your blog and send tweets at exactly the right time.
One solution is to schedule your posts and tweets.
Scheduling Works Wonders
It's tough to write things on the spot, every day, and post at that same golden hour.
There are days you might get inspired and write three or four posts and tweet about them. Then there might be a week where you're stuck in meetings, or traveling, and don't have time to post anything.
Schedule your blog posts. You don't want a random blog that goes crazy one week, then shuts up the next week. No matter what you use -- WordPress, Blogger, LiveWriter -- there's a feature to publish posts later. Put in the month, day and time and you're done.
Scheduling tweets is a little tougher, since Twitter itself doesn't let you. Use something like Tweetcaster for that.
Scheduling posts and tweets is especially good for publicizing evergreen stories, opeds and speeches, things with a long shelf life. Have a rotation of scheduled tweets and blog posts to generate more hits to those cornerstones of your message.
The technology of social media and public relations is changing by the week. Yet certain bedrock principles will never change. If you talk too much, too often, people will see it as spam. But if you're not out there when people are looking, they won't know you exist.