How to Not Let Social Networking Sites Dominate Your Life

Do you know that there are several things you can do to optimize the time you spend on Social Media?

I love to spend my time between Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn but it can certainly chew up time if you let it.  I have composed a few ways to help you manage your time with Social Media networking.

1. Schedule your updates (Hootsuite, Sprout Social, tweet deck and many others)
• You can line up a bunch of posts to see what kind of interest they generate.
• Things like quotes, or key information about you or your industry
• You can even schedule important time sensitive updates (to tell people about a particular sale, open house etc)
2. There is even a tool called Buffer (I love this little tool).
• You can add updates to the “buffer” and it will post and tweet them for you
• You can get suggested posts from it as well
• You can load it on your toolbar to post pages you find
• You can even get it for Twitter so that you can “buffer” all the cool things people say and tweet them out later ;)
• It is only for Twitter (and now facebook)
3. Check into your Social Media sites at least 2 times a day (three is better)
• Check for DM’s (direct messages) and respond
• Check for new followers on Twitter and thank
• Check out groups and discussions you are part of, other people’s posts
• Add value to the groups discussions
• Share some content from the people you are following
• Then get out!
• This should only take about 5-10 min (depends on how many people you are following and long you are searching through their posts)
4. I like to have my settings adjusted so that everytime there is something that I feel is important, I get an email, and I read those emails on my Smart phone.
• Sometimes I get a lot of emails that are of little importance, but when I get one that is urgent it makes up for the others that I just skim over.

I look forward to hearing from you… Let me know if these work for you, and if you have any others to suggest.