Social Media Time Management

Trying to keep your Social Media Life up-to-date can be a time consuming, and arduous chore, but with these simple tricks and tools, that time can easily be cut in half. Not only that, but by implementing the following ideas, driving traffic to your site, and reaching new audiences becomes easy as well. Also, while I was writing this post, a similar post was made to www.brandyourself.com, Jessica has a few other tools that can be helpful, but I did not mention them here.

Tips and Tricks:

  • Be Blog Central- Publish your best and brightest ideas to your blog. By keeping everything in one place like this, people will know where to look for all your new content. Also, being blog central keeps your promotion simple. Pushing everyone to the same place makes for less work on your end.
  • Link Them Up- All of the big Social Networks, and many of the “little” ones, allow you to link all of your sites together. So link your facebook to your twitter, and your twitter to your blog, and so on. This way, posting to one, posts to them all, and you don’t have to go around reposting your same thought or idea in 10 different places.
  • Schedule- If you have tons of work on your plate, schedule specific times to use Social Media. For myself, school work comes first, so most of my SM time is after 9:00pm, and it works for me. I’ll write blogs, peruse twitter, and pay attention to facebook, while catching up on the latest episode of House or Heroes.
  • Mobile- Now I imagine there are two camps here, one for it and one against it. Personally I am all for it. Connect your SM to your phone. I get wordpress, facebook, and twitter (not to mention others) all on my phone. Personally I have an issue with remembering what to blog about next, so wordpress on my phone allows me to jot down a quick draft. Facebook and Twitter allow me to see if people are responding, and they allow me to make note of any issues that I will have to deal with later, cutting down on the time I spend working in the evening. A word of advice though, I only update my SM on my phone once an hour, and am not constantly checking on it, if you are the kind of person who will check it 5+ times an hour, only to read the same things, mobile probably isn’t an answer for you.

Tools:

  • Tweet Deck- Tweet Deck is a third party application, and probably my favorite time saver. Tweet deck allows you to manage and view all of your social media accounts (twitter, facebook, linked in, myspace) through a simple desktop application. You can even manage multiple twitter accounts. Updating all your accounts at once is as easy as two or three click, 140 characters, and the enter button.
  • Tweetmeme-Allows for really easy sharing. After publishing a blog, and promoting it, tweetmeme allows your readers to continue to promote for you. When readers click the “retweet” button, tweetmeme automatically pushes a link to your new post through your readers twitter account, taking promoting out of your hands. This is one of the most powerful tools you can use for promoting, and it takes almost no effort.
  • Feedburner- While not really a time saving tool, feedburner will automatically push your new post to anyone who is following your RSS feed. A big benefit of feedburner is tracking. Feedburner allows you to monitor how many people are subscribed to your feed, letting you know how many people actually care about what you have to say.
  • Google Analytics- Again, not a tool that looks like a time saving device, analytics really will help. By monitoring what you are using to promote, and tracking that with analytics, you can see what works and what doesn’t. That way you can take efforts away from strategies that aren’t working, and focus more time on strategies that are.

These are the tips, tricks, and tools that I am currently using, and I am always looking for more ways to be productive. If you have a tip or trick, why don’t you share it in the comments?