Summer Startup Ch. 03 | Wake & Work | Social Media Apps

Heyyoooo Friends,

Or perhaps I should say, good-morning friends, as this particular chapter discusses our first steps to every morning. Let’s face it, mornings suck. You’ve established a nice cozy position in your bed, snuggled up under your covers, and bam, your alarm clock starts moaning. You probably hit snooze a handful of times before you realize part of you needs to be responsible. If you aren’t a morning person, this is typically your routine, if not – we envy you. But for those filled with envy, there is good news, and we are here to share with you how we get up and get the ball rolling.

Since our office is technically in the same building as our apartment, the morning commute to Creative Revolution is relatively short. A few steps to be exact. This gives us a few extra minutes of sleep a night – for which we are forever grateful. Still, the mornings are tough, but the easiest way to get yourself out of bed in the morning starts the night before. On the eve of your morning, plan your next day’s events. It does not have to be an in-depth analysis of the day; a simple itemized list of tasks will do. This ought to get you mentally prepared for the next day as you won’t find yourself wondering what to do first. Early morning productivity is the key component of getting your morning rolling. Our first item on our daily checklist is managing our social media channels.

However, the very first thing that occurs in the morning, which has become something of a necessity, is our morning coffee. Without the morning Dunkin Donuts coffee, mornings are nothing but an awkward slumber that resembles an intoxicated old man. While the coffee is brewing, we pound 12oz. of water and do a little stretch. Getting the blood flowing and your muscles moving stimulates the brain and jumpstarts your metabolism. Sitting down at the dining room table, with the tablet screen burning my not-yet-prepared retinas, the morning news is consumed, and we do a little catching up on blog spots that were posted overnight (Thanks to my Australian friends).

At around 9 am the morning work truly begins. With the coffee consumed, and maybe a light breakfast, we bust out the first of our social media apps, the Hootsuite owly. For those of you using Hootsuite, you will already know that the application has a wake-up feature, we find it sweet. It also lets you know when you are slacking off from monitoring your channel. Now, the night before, I typically set up a few early morning messages to be posted on our behalf. These posts are scheduled to be posted for the early birds, the times when we are not awake, or barely awake. These auto-scheduled posts are a great feature of Hootsuite and can be used strategically throughout the day. It works particularly well when you are on the go and are unable to post for a period. So we have Hootsuite sending off two, maybe three messages in the morning, while we gather our morning thoughts.

After managing to schedule our posts for the remainder of the day, retweeting, responding to last nights messages, we carry on to our next step of managing our social media apps. We love our followers, and we try to reward them with fun, interesting content, however, some of our followers no longer appreciate the content produced. Who.Unfollowed.Me is an excellent source to find out what users have recently unfollowed you. We typically monitor this on a day to day basis. It is not an obsession, but more of a curiosity aspect. We are interested in seeing the behavior of Twitter followers. We find that some users follow us, and then once we follow them, they unfollow us. We are privy to this and typically unfollow them back. They are trying to pad their follower numbers with a bait and switch tactic. We aren’t falling for your tricks @celestamartin97. Additionally, on this platform, we can view our new followers, which we will indeed follow back. We believe in the community and the purpose of Twitter. We want to support our followers, at least the ones they seem to provide value.

The next step in our morning social media activity is finding new people to follow. We use Tweepi’s Twitter manager to seek out those that follower our role models. We type in the Twitter handle of our role model and sort the list by follow ratio. For the most part, we befriend users that have a follow ratio under 100 percent, as those users tend to follow more than they are being followed. To try to reach small businesses and startups, we try to focus our following strategy on businesses, as opposed to individuals.

By now it is the 10 O’clock hour, and our next item on the checklist is coming up. Stay tuned for more bits and pieces of the daily life of a startup. Like this kind of stuff? Follow us on Twitter, and you’ll know when we release the newest articles.

Keep grinding people.

Derek Brusin

I am the one who likes cupcakes.

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