Social Media Time Management

So, this blog post will also be about time management, something I am actively working on.   This post will deal with Social Media, and how much of a 'Time Sink' it can be.
I mean think about it, Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, LinkedIn, Pintrest ... and so on... you could literally spend hours keeping people up-to-date on all your coming and goings... and if you blog, as I do (Obviously) then you have even more to do.   So what is the best way to keep up and still use these tools?

Glad you asked... here you go.

1. Set up a schedule. You do not have to add a new post to every social network every day. This can eat up a lot of time from your daily schedule and leave you feeling just plain overwhelmed. The important thing is that when you do post, make sure it is valuable or fun content that will generate a good response from your fans and followers.

2. Create a content stockpile. As a part of your social media schedule, set up a time during the week where you brainstorm content ideas for blog posts, status updates, tweets, etc. This will eliminate any stress of having to come up with something on the spot from one week to the next. Then, when the time comes to update your posts, you can just select something from the pile and post.

3. Link your networks. When you are doing things on your own, it can be hard to find the time to post to multiple accounts. You can link each of your profiles so that when you post on one account, say your Facebook page, then it is also sent out to the others and vice versa. Tools like Buffer, Tweetdeck and even Facebook Scheduled Posts can make this happen in the background for you.

5. Get automated. One bonus of having a content stockpile is that you can use tools like Socialoomph, Buffer and Timely for Twitter to schedule its release automatically. This doesn’t mean you can put all of your social media posts on auto-pilot though, because that just defeats the purpose.
You can schedule certain things, but you still need to go back and make responses where needed and take time to actually interact with your fans.

6. Combined engagement. Other tools make it simple to monitor and update your accounts from one spot. You can use Hootsuite or Tweetdeck to create a dashboard that lets you handle multiple social media accounts from a single platform, saving you time.
Create alerts for important topics such as your company name, product names and competitors. Create Twitter Lists of your most important customers, partners and media contacts so you can monitor their activity in real time.

7. Set up topic alerts. Save yourself time from searching for industry news articles by setting up a Google Alert for specified topics. You can search through the results for news that relates to you. When you find something of interest, you can share it with your followers.

I hope these tips will help you, I did not even know about some of these, until doing the research for time management, so I will be implementing some of these great ideas.   I think though, the important thing to think about while implementing these ideas is make sure you don't turn into an 'Automaton'... keep everything real and interesting and most important, interesting to you!