Thanks to everyone who attended our webinar yesterday and if you missed out please feel free to download it now and listen to it at your leisure.

If you follow Amber within the realm of Social Media, you already know that she lives and breathes social media all day, every day. And since she works in this field of overwhelming information, she has learned how to manage her social media time.  For those of you that don’t know Amber, you should follow her @AmberCadabra and get to know her better.

Amber gets tons of questions relating to social media:

• Where do I start?
• What tools should I use?
• How do I prioritize?
• What can I automate?

Her Social Media Time Management Webinar answers all of those questions for you. To pique your interest I’ll give you a quick overview.

The first part of her answer is “Get Organized”. Setting your social media goals will help to determine the amount of time you need to spend in social media.

Being involved in social media means using listening tools, engaging & participating, and measuring & analyzing. So how can you do all of this? Well, how long have you been in the social media space?

Amber’s Social Media Maturity Model gives you time suggestions based on where you are in your social media journey. If you are in the passive stage, you will spend the majority of your time just listening. However, if you are in the engaged phase you will need to listen, initiate, respond and measure. Referring to the Social Media Maturity Model will give you a good idea of how you should be breaking down your social media time.

9 Strategies to Find Time for ALL of Your Social Media Tasks:

1. Manage Disruptions – pick 3 things you must do today and don’t move off of them until they are done




2. Information Overload – stop trying to be everywhere and read everything. It’s ok to delete emails and unsubscribe from blogs you don’t read.




3. Leverage Tools – there are tons of helpful tools out there and Amber shares the ones that she uses. The important thing to remember though is do NOT automate your interactions. The purpose of leveraging tools is to automate tasks that can be automated which will create the time to be genuine when you participate in social media.




4. Annotate and Share – tagging, favoriting and bookmarking on sites like Delicious are great ways for you to create a reference for yourself and others and a content base for your community.




5. When Templates are OK – the key here is not to automate responses but to use templates to help answer recurring questions. Personalizing the template is extremely important.




6. Simple Task Management – delete the clutter and capture the tasks you need to do. Then put all of your tasks in a simple task management system.




7. Communication and Expectations – make sure you communicate your limitations and your expectations of others. It’s ok to say that you don’t know the answer and direct them to someone who does or to say that it will take you a few days to complete a task.




8. Routines – schedule times to do your tasks. It is ok to turn off email and your phone to get things done.




9. Unplugging – be with your friends and family. Spend time at offline events. You need downtime.

A  20 minute Q & A follows at the end of the webinar where Amber goes into a bit more detail on some of the tools that she uses and answers some great questions.

Resources:

Social Media Time Management Presentation

Social Media Time Management eBook

Social Media Starter Kit

GoToMeeting Social Media Time Management Webinar Archive

Tags: Social Media, social media time management, time management