Expert Upon Arrival

I have an article in this month’s WedLock magazine on time management tips for social media. I am often asked to speak on the subject as well. One introduction suggested I was a“social media time management specialist” to which I promptly snorted the water I was sipping up my nose!

There are no experts or gurus in social media concerning time management (or social media, for that matter.) We are ALL learning as we go. It would be like claiming to be the nation’s utmost tour guide for the North America continent upon disembarking the Mayflower. We all just got here and we are all learning as we go.

That being said, I am happy to share the few time saving tips I have discovered with you. Social media has a bad reputation of being a time suck and rightly so.  A few time management tips can help whack away some of the brush as we travel further inland.

• Gather ideas for blog posts, Tweets or Facebook updates continuously. This can be on index cards you carry in your wallet or purse, on an open document on your computer or even in the notes section on your phone.
• Blog in batches. Write a month’s worth of blog posts—or at least start a month’s worth of blog posts—in WordPress and then save as drafts.
• Use tools such as Ping.fm, Hootsuite, or SocialOomph to manage more than one platform at a time or to schedule posts and updates.
• If you do not already, start using a RSS feedreader (such as Google Reader) to cut your reading time down. I also schedule a quarterly RSS purge, dropping the blogs that are no longer useful to me.

What tips have you found? How do you tame the social media monster?