BTL 5: Making a commitment

You have profiles, messages, an audience and suitable channels lined up. You now need to decide how much time you are going to spend on thought leadership, and how you will allocate your time.

Thought leadership takes time. You are trying to build up a trust-based relationship with your audience. However much content you share, it will take a certain amount of time to consolidate relationships—but sharing more, and consistently, will build the relationship faster.

You need to consider how much time you wish to spend on thought leadership, and when.

For example, some people take 30 minutes each day. Other people do all their thought leadership ‘work’ in a couple of hours one day per week, using a scheduling tool to post throughout the week.

If you do not already share content and engage on social media, it will probably take time to build up the habit. It is a good idea to make a commitment to use specific time slots—and put them into your schedule—to avoid ‘more important’ work taking over.

You also need to think about how you will split your time between the three pillars of topic, audience and engagement.

Engagement is fun, because you get to spend time on social media ‘chatting’ to people and building relationships. However, if you don’t also concentrate on topic and audience, then you may find that you have wasted time engaging with the wrong people or on the wrong subject. There is more about this here.