Facebooking, Tweeting, chatting, blogging. Who even has time for dinner anymore?
As your social networking and social media tools expand, it’s important to maintain control of your communication. Whether for business, personal use, or both, streamline your social media presence by tapping into these time-management tips and tools designed specifically for social media technology.
Evaluate your needs
There are new social media outlets being created every day; keeping up with them can be a challenge. A few years ago, you might have checked your e-mail and maintained a MySpace page. Now, many users have a couple of Facebook pages and a Twitter account, while making regular visits to Foursquare.
Whether you network for personal use or business needs, it is a good idea to evaluate your tools to make sure they add to your productivity. If you are the on-the-go social butterfly of your group and keep everyone in the know, using Twitter for frequent, short bursts of information might be the best tool for you. If your business relies on your expertise in your field, then a regularly-updated Wordpress blog might be the perfect way to share informative industry-related information.
Every social media tool has benefits and limitations, and there’s no rule that you have to use all of them. If you aren’t sure which tools are for you, try a few and see how you like them. You’ll quickly learn which ones make your life more interesting and efficient, and which are less meaningful.
Find the time
Anyone who has spent five minutes with Facebook knows that a quick session can easily turn into a longer one. Time management is an important skill to master for maximizing your social media interaction. A common strategy is to set aside certain times of the day to log in and catch up. Personal users typically check in before work, during lunch and at the end of the day. Business users may need to look more often, setting blocks of time — say, 30 minutes — in the morning and afternoon to send out updates to customers. Choose a schedule that works for you, but stay faithful to the limits you set.
If you have the feeling that you are spending more time than you need to on social media pursuits, try logging the time you spend accessing social media for one week to get an accurate idea of the time you dedicate to it. If you find yourself getting sucked in for hours, you might want to set a kitchen timer for fifteen minutes each time you log in: when the buzzer goes off, you’re done.
Keep it together
Now that there are many social media outlets available, companies are creating helpful tools to bundle access to favorite sites. By managing your social media outlets with one app, you don’t have to log in to every social media tool separately to check out the action; you can hit them all at once and save time.
Popular tools are available for online use, or you can download apps for your smartphone. Favorites include Digsby, Postling, Hootsuite and iSkoot. Experiment with a few and see which interface you like the best. (Or ask your Facebook friends what they recommend.)
Discover the missing link
Another smart way to streamline your social media messages is to link your tools. Products like Cotweet and Futuretweets help you schedule tweets in advance and automatically post them to Facebook and LinkedIn. Twitterfeed allows you to feed your recent blog posts to all of your social media accounts. With one post, you can reach all of your friends and get back to the fun stuff — like work.
Keeping up with social media technology can quickly turn into a full-time job, so streamline your efforts with the many helpful tools available. The main goal of streamlining is to make your social media use fun, productive, and efficient. So you have more time for, you know, being social.
