Social Media Management Requires Time Management

Have you ever opened up TweetDeck and planned on getting multiple things done and then 4 hours later you realize you have not even started those initial projects?  Have you found yourself just clicking links on Twitter and reading blogs and checking Facebook for updates or just get lost in the social media world?  Well, that is not going to get anything accomplished for you.  So in order to properly manage your social media, you need to be a time management expert as well.  Here are a few tips and tricks to manage it better.

Plan Out Your Work

Before you get to work, plan it all out.  Figure out everything that it is you want to get accomplished and either write it down or put it into an excel worksheet.  I prefer Excel because I am able to easiliy sort and filter diffrent things out based upon the project or client and estimated time, etc.  The next step in this planning is to prioritize your projects and give them all an estimated time to complete.  Once you have this, you are ready to get to work.

Egg Timer

Screw all this fancy technology and timer apps (even though I am going to recommend one for people who are working on a hourly rate for a project), and go down into the kitchen and find your parents, or grand parents old egg timer.  This is a perfect tool to keep you on target and not spending too much time on one project and then forgetting about another.  For example, if I have a goal of launching TweetDeck and going through tweets from earlier in the afternoon when I was not at a computer, I will set the egg timer for 30 minutes.  Once it goes off, that’s it, time to move onto the next thing, which for me may be catching up on everything in my Google Reader.  Lisa Barone from Outspoken Media has a great post on time management and her usage of an egg timer as well.

Toggl

Toggl is a perfect app if you are doing contract or consulting work and need to keep track of how much time you are spending on that particular project.  I would not recommend this if you are just trying to keep yourself on a schedule as a timer.  If you are working with a team as well, this tool will allow you to keep track and manage other team members work time as well.  It is a simple click of a button to start and a click to stop it.  You can access it from pretty much anywhere which is what I like the most about it.

Social Media becomes a lot easier when you know how to manage your time on it.  There are so many different distractions out there that it is easy to get lost in something completely different then what you set out to do.  Follow these couple of tips and you will be working more efficiently in no time.
photo credit: gothick_matt via photopin cc