Time Management: Social Media Un-Productivity: How to Avoid Addiction

SOCIAL MEDIA UN-PRODUCTIVITY – HOW TO AVOID ADDICTION

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I’ve coined the term Obsessive Compulsive Social Media Disorder. Do you have it?

Many people confess, “Facebook is my secret addiction. I’m obsessed! I don’t really know how to cure it, but I spend hours every day on Facebook, plus LinkedIn, Twitter, and all my other social media sites. I’ve not yet been able to monetize the results of this activity and am not really sure whether I am getting any business off of it.”

It’s a common complaint. You absolutely need to have a presence in social media and spend time doing it; however, it can be a huge productivity drain if you are not careful.

Here are a few tips to make it more manageable and more productive:

1. Do not leave your Twitter feed open and observe posts in real time.

There are a lot of 3rd party tools to help you sort through all the clutter and pay attention to the posts you really care about. I use www.tweetdeck.com and turn off all the alerts. The last thing you want when you’re trying to concentrate on an important document is for alerts to sound and text boxes to be pop up all over the place, distracting you from what you’re trying to work on. Use a tool that will help you consolidate all the information, keep up with favorite people and search terms, and reply to direct messages.

2. Get as much automatic linkage as you can get.

For example, each day I post the Productivity Pro Tip of the Day to Twitter. I don’t post these manually. I went to hootsuite.com, loaded 365 tips for the next year, where automatically, every day at 8:15 a.m., hootsuite posts that day’s tip to Twitter.

That automatically posts to my Facebook and LinkedIn. Everything has a dual purpose. You want to be able to post in one place and have it show up on another. When I post an article or video on my blog, it’s automatically cross-posted on my Facebook fan page.

3. Try to limit how many times a day you check your profiles.

See if you can get yourself down to checking/posting three times a day: morning, noon, and afternoon. I only check twice. I check once about 10:00 and once about 3:00. You have to figure out what the formula is for you, but always being on and never having more than a four-minute block at any one time to do your work is truly going to sabotage your results. Your goal with social media is to achieve maximum results in minimum time.

Get creative about how you can cure your Obsessive Compulsive Social Media Disorder. Here is to getting rid of the addiction!

To find out more about The Productivity Pro®, Inc. or have Laura Stack speak at an upcoming meeting or event, please visit at www.theproductivitypro.com.

Make it a productive day! ™

© 2010 Laura Stack. All Rights Reserved

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