Monday, March 26, 2012

5 Tips for Avoiding the Social Media Time Suck




This Article is a Guest Post.


Social networking platforms allow for interaction but as it happens in real life, you need to limit the time you give to social media to avoid wasting time by virtually spending your everyday life on one or the other social networking platform. This holds true for marketing professionals undertaking the task of social media marketing for an organization and even people in general who use social networking sites for interacting with people from across the world. It is important for you to bring some method to the madness before your productivity levels at work fall. Here's how you can avoid falling into the trap.

1. Allocate time to your social media activities
Give your undivided attention to your social media marketing or interaction activities while you are at it. Tweet, reply to messages, post on Facebook and other social networking platforms. Just when you are about to go beyond the time allocated, make the switch to take up other activities at hand. Professionals need to realize that work and leisure on social media do not go hand in hand.

2. Understand where to draw the line
It is good to keep the communication channels open but you must not allow these to turn into distractions. Make it a point to not allow your productivity levels to go for a toss just because a friend wanted to talk and you could not say no. Professional marketers too need to know that they have to get better results in limited time rather than spending all their time on social media.

3. Work according to a plan
Apart from the obvious use for interaction, social media is fast emerging as a tool for product promotion and brand building. Bloggers too use social networking platforms to get more traffic for their blogs. It is required then that you set your targets and chalk out the strategies for achieving the same. Analyze the results you get and tweak your implementation methodologies in accordance. Use tools to automate your posts so as to reach out to people when there is maximum activity on social networks.

4. Take note of your limitations
We might want to believe ourselves to be multi-taskers who can handle interaction on social media while attending to our professional commitments. Statistics tell a different story. Distraction due to indulging in social media activities while at work is a common cause of loss of productivity of about 2 hours per day.

5. Know your priorities
Organize your activities to highlight your priorities for each hour. Never allow your priorities to suffer for one reason or the other.
Social media has come as a refreshing change in our busy lives. These portals make it so much easier for people to interact not only with those they happen to know in real life but also people from different walks of life they can relate to or would like to follow for their expertise in certain domains. Marketers too get the convenience of reaching out to a large number of people in their target market segment. Social media interaction is here to stay then. All that is needed is a methodical approach to the process.


About the author: Kelly is a blogger by profession. She loves writing on technology and luxury. Beside this she is fond of gadgets. Recently an article on Maruti Swift attracted her attention. These days she is busy in writing an article on 3D Games.




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2 comments:

virtueinfo said...

great sharing on social media.

thanks :)

Karl said...

Great tips in avoiding time suck and I indeed agree that social media is one of the things that can suck most of your time. With these tips it can help minimize the use of social media to stay productive. One of the best ways that I do to prevent social media sucks my time especially when working is I list my entire tasks then set an estimated amount of time when working on each task using this tool. This helps me stays focus on tasks, ignore work distractions, limit wasted time and boost productivity. The key that I can effectively follow scheduled tasks and finish it on time is with discipline.

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