Fitting Social Media into your day
Recently I wrote about the Social Media coffee shop. I promised to follow up with some tips on how you can fit this stuff into limited time, like your coffee breaks. Here goes!
Getting familiar (without getting overwhelmed)
If you’re new to social media or even a particular aspect of it, it can seem like a foreign country — one with strange language, etiquette and tools. It’s a good idea take on only one platform at a time (blogging OR Facebook OR Twitter). Also, begin when you can afford that bit of extra time, know that you’ll be spending more time than normal to start with it, and relax about that.
Some resources for learning about social media
- Practice Building 101 – a free e-book. It’s geared at health practitioners but a lot of the principles apply to anyone trying to wrap their head around this stuff.
- Friends with Benefits: a Social Media Marketing Handbook – soon-to-be-released book by Darren Barefoot and Julie Szabo. As owners of Capulet Communications they’ve been into marketing with social media since long before we had a name for it. This’ll be good.
- The Unconventional Guide to the Social Web by Chris Guillebeau and Gwen Bell. This package comes in several bundles of e-book, audio and some video and promises lots of inspiration about how people are using social media in their lives.
- If you’ve already started diving into all of this, and are feeling at all overwhelmed by it, check out Sonia Simone’s How to get any work done (when connecting is your job). Sonia’s great suggestions are the reason this post is getting done now and not “soon”
OK, maybe you don’t want so much theory or foundational stuff, but you just want some more tangible ideas on how to make these things less of a time suck. I’m with you! Here are some things I’ve tried, and I welcome you to share any of your tips in the comments.
- Adjust your notification settings. You can decide whether you want an email every time someone new follows you and every time you get a direct message. I used to immediately check out new followers on twitter when I got that little email notification, and OMG what a time suck that can be. You can turn these off, or just choose not to look at them right away. Maybe set up a filter in your email so you’re not distracted by them coming into your inbox. If you do turn them off you probably won’t notice new followers unless they tweet with your username in it, if then.
- Use the favourites button. You can mark any tweet as a “favourite”. Lately I’ve been using this as a way to remind myself of an interesting link that I don’t have to follow NOW. If you click on every interesting thing posted in your twitter stream, you can literally spend all day in twitter + surfing. Now I mark those as favourites and read them later.
- Use a Twitter program/client. Once you’re comfortable with the environment at twitter.com, you might explore the various ways of connecting to Twitter. There are programs you can install on your computer (though I haven’t tried them). I like to use Hootsuite. It’s made for people who want to manage multiple accounts, but what I like about it is:
- Nothing to install – just log in to hootsuite.com from any computer and I get the same experience, without the hassle of installing software.
- Multi-column view – instead of clicking on twitter.com’s @tzaddi tab to see who’s talking to/about me, I can display that column all the time next to my general stream.
- Custom columns – I can save a search on a particular topic as a column to watch. So right now I have one that’s displaying anything on the topic of #wcpdx, a conference I’m attending this weekend. It also has a Featured tab/group to which I’ve added some of my favourite tweeters. If I don’t have time to check my full stream, I can switch to that tab and keep up with a few conversations among important contacts.
- Open carefully – I have my web browser open pretty much all day with multiple tabs open for the things I’m doing. If I leave the Hootsuite tab open, I’m a lot more likely to check in and waste a few minutes. So, I try to close it when I’m not consciously choosing to spend that time on twitter.
- Adjust your notification settings. (Sound familiar?) For goodness sake, if you let Facebook email you everytime one of your “friends” sneezes you’ll go nuts. Go into the settings and tweak it to what works for you. It’s not perfect – I’d like more options, myself – but it’s a start.
- Hide the crap. If you look at your Facebook newsfeed and see something or someone that doesn’t interest you, you can hide some of it. Hold your mouse over the top right corner of the item, and a little “hide” option will show up. It’ll let you either hide that person altogether, or if it’s an application like a quiz, you’ll be able to hide any more items like that. I personally hide every darn quiz that shows up in my feed. Call me crazy but I really don’t care which 70’s rock star or desert my friends are like.
- Be careful about de-friending. Even though Facebook won’t tell someone if you remove them from your friends list, they may still notice. If you’re they’re just too noisy in your feed, hide them instead. If it’s more of a privacy/relationship-gone-bad kind of thing, well, I suppose you do what you have to do.
No matter when you choose to fit social media into your day, I hope some of these tips might help you streamline and make the most of that time. I also hope you’ll share tips of your own in the comments.
So, what challenges or tips do you have around fitting this stuff in?