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Posts Tagged ‘productivity management’

Everyone knows that social media is great for business – as a marketing tool. But what effect does it have on your business productivity?

Lately I’ve found myself spending most of my days looking for stuff to tweet, following other people’s links and staying up to date with my Twitter feeds. How much of this can be attributed as real work is questionable and with the to-do list growing and less getting done it’s time to implement some business productivity management.

So to get the right mix between getting work done and having time to engage in effective social media I’ve come up with the following system:

1. Steamline Twitter and Facebook into separate feeds so I don’t have to go through pages of Tweets on different subjects. I’m using Hootsuite for this as it puts all social networking activity in one place. There are lots of tools like this to manage your twitter feeds and other social networks but I won’t go into them in this post.

2. Get my content sources aggregated into 2 places. One is Google reader where I put RSS feeds from sites and blogs  I choose to subscribe to. The other is popurls which aggregates news from all over the place in one big searchable page.

3. Organise my time around getting things done. I won’t go into great detail here about time management but when I sit down to accomplish a certain task I like to turn off any possible distractions like email notifications (I close my email program), instant messages and that Twitter tab with (150) new tweets you just have to check every 2 minutes..

So for example let’s say I’m setting up a squeeze page and writing a blog post for a client. These are two tasks I have to accomplish today, preferably in enough time so that I can take the rest of the day off afterwards This is how the day would go:

• Beginning of the day – switch on computer.
• Check emails, look at the charts for any trades for today (if life weren’t complicated enough I trade forex and commodities as well!).
• Check Twitter/Facebook.
• Check Content feeds for interesting and relevant items to tweet and tweet if applicable.
• Close down email client and web browser tabs with Hootsuite/Google Reader/PopURLs.
• Do task #1 – set up squeeze page for client #1
• When finished check email, Facebook, Twitter, any open trades and new trade opportunities.
• Tweet something/retweet/reply to someone else’s tweet – catch up on tweets.
• Have lunch.
• Check email, Facebook, Twitter, any open trades and new trade opportunities.
• Tweet something/retweet/reply to someone else’s tweet – catch up on tweets.
• Close down email client and web browser tabs with Hootsuite/Google Reader/PopURLs.
• Do task #2 write blog post for client
• Check email, Facebook, Twitter, any open trades and new trade opportunities.
• Tweet something/retweet/reply to someone else’s tweet – catch up on tweets.

For a small business using social media as a marketing tool it’s essential that you organise your SMO activities around your regular business activities. Social media doesn’t have to be a productivity killer.