Rebecca, 
 
This list is really helpful, and I especially appreciate that you indicate how much time (roughly, I assume) should be spent on each item. When we advise our clients on the need to adopt these habits, time always becomes a critical factor, and I often find myself downplaying the amount of time it takes. In some cases, that's true. The only item above that I think might end up taking more time than you allocate would be the "Answer Industry-related LinkedIn questions" step. I try to answer questions on a fairly regular basis, but find that it takes more than 3 minutes to actually provide a substantial/helpful answer. Perhaps I'm just a slower thinker- I wonder if other people find the same thing?

Another great tip (and timesaver) is to connect your Twitter account with your Facebook account, so that each time you update Twitter you update your Facebook status. This gives greater exposure to your Tweets and saves you having to update your status in two places. If you want to integrate your social networks even further, check out Ping.fm, which will allow you to update up to 30 of your favorite social networks at once. 
 
Cheers!

Great list for a way to spend a minimum of time updating and observing your brand presence online.  
 
One key addendum (that is considerably more time consuming, but fun and educational) is combing and developing a rss feed of blogs in your industry from which to comment, observe and interact. Don't just go after the ones that comment on your brand specifically...by inserting yourself in the conversation: you will get covered eventually.

Thanks for the help. Wonderful article that I could put to use right away.

There is some great conversation going here!  
 
I also would like to emphasize, like Stuart mentioned, that this is indeed an estimated *minimum* amount. One could easily spend twenty minutes, an hour, more!

Really good first step ideas, but I agree w/ previous comments that monitoring the conversation take a lot longer than 10 minutes.  
 
 
 
Listening is, indeed, the first step, but then participating the discussions around your brand requires good business strategy and plenty more time.  
 
 
 
Another piece of social media marketing that is often overlooked is that social media is inherently social. Attending relevant events OFFLINE can be just as important as participating in online discourse about your brand/category/industry. In-person interactions deepen and humanize the connections and discussions that you have online.

Good to know I am doing some of this naturally....automation makes virtual business so much easier. 
 
Michelle 
The Soul Alignment Biz Coach

Excellent post. And I'd say, no, Chris, you're not a slow-thinker--and you're not alone. Providing answers that add value to the conversation (providing an explanation, example, useful link, etc.) and not repeating information that's already been said certainly takes me longer than 3 minutes.

OK. Great first article. Now, second article should be about what do you do with the information you get from all that checking and monitoring of your social media presence.

Great post, Rebecca (and thx to @ellieeille for the RT). I agree with others on the time involved. 
 
I'd love to see a follow up post on the analytics and reporting on the other end. That is, once you've finished these 10-20 min of daily monitoring, what tools do you use to compile, track, analyze and share the social media results? How do you take those Google alerts from your inbox to a well-organized report? Or compile and rank tweets, LI answers, etc.? 

10 mins is definitely a minimum time, but these are great steps. creating rss feeds for each of these and routing all those through a reader is a must to keep the time investment as brief as possible.  
 
@rebecca -- is this what hubspot express basically does for you?

I also set up Twilerts & get the Twitter conversation mentions delivered to me via email. Not real-time like Twitter search, but still helpful. A quick Technorati search is also helpful. Great post. Thanks! 
 
@kathyoreilly

Andrew: HubFeed (a component of Express, as well as the whole HubSpot software) tracks Twitter, Digg, Reddit, LinkedIn Answers and others for your company name and keywords. Google alerts gets a broader reach of blog/website mentions, but HubFeed gets the prominent stuff. :)

Thanks Rebecca!

I agree, this would most likely take more than 10 minutes...this list assumes that once you get to these sites you will not find any comments or questions to respond to! I guess this really is only a list of ways to "monitor" and not actually manage your social media presence.  
 
Thank you, this post gave me some good ideas for consolidating my searches for my brand on various SM sites. 

I think the 10 minutes is realistic when monitoring, as stated in the title of the post. Time to respond/act is another matter. Looks like there is a market need to help customer service reps manage this emerging landscape. I say customer service, because consumers are using ever more options to ask questions and find answers.

Saving time to be more effective is always appreciated. 
 
To go even further and save MORE time, I'd suggest: 
 
* Put all these bookmarks in a single folder. With Firefox or another modern browser, you can select "Open All in Tabs", then watch as they fly open and load in seconds. 
 
* Setup an aggregated dashboard on http://netvibes.com or another service like it. That'll give you an even more effective at-a-glance view.

Thank you for such great information! It will get put to good use.

I don't see an rss button after I do a Twitter search.  
 
How do you set up an RSS feed for a specific Twitter search? 
 
Thanks, 
David

Can someone point me to a "help" page to help me get #5 done? I can't seem to find anything very easily on the help section of Google reader.

I agree with khmohsin: I've been doing each one of these steps and the only way it could POSSIBLY take just 10 minutes would be if I ignored critical messages from critical contacts!

Or, go out and do something in the real world that creates buzz buzz and see if you can get others to spread the word for you... anyone monetize social affiliations yet? 
 
(wearing logos like in idiocracy)

I can do this in only 8 minutes! 
 
...but that's because I'm not currently working-no lol. 
 
Good post and even better comments.

Tip: You can combine all these feeds (and more) with Yahoo Pipes and create a single RSS feed. All, except for Facebook that is.

Wow, this is great info! I'm going to share it with my twitter audience.  
 
Thanks,  
Adam

As crucial as staying connected with business social media is....these great tips make it much easier to work into your day. Thanks for the post.

Excellent Analysis Rebecca. 
 
Thanks, keep posting...

Another good website to check if you or your clients are trying to raise individual profiles is yasni.co.uk - it looks through all the major social networking sites and brings back info about the person that's out there.

When is the last time someone was able to pull themselves away from Google Reader in 2.5 minutes? These timeframes are not realistic if you much to respond to. 
 
But I love the list and the organization.

While it COULD take you 10 minutes ... are you really engaging??? If all you want to do is 'check-in' .. OK. But checking in on a regular basis will not get you the results you want, you must also be proactively involved.

Extremely helpful article!! Another great reason why I regularly engage the HubSpot website for social media and digital marketing strategy insights. 
 
 
 
I spend probably at least 20 minutes a day just searching LinkedIn discussion forums and polls looking for content/questions that may impact my own firm or clients. Late last night I discovered an LI Poll that positively referenced the competitors of two of my clients' and neglected to mention my clients in the poll altogether.  
 
 
 
I brought this to their attention and my clients were extremely appreciative. So important to strengthen the bonds of current relationships during a turbulent economy. 
 
 
 
My sincere thanks for this post, 
 
Tony Faustino