Being aware of some effective time management tips is going to help you greatly with your social media campaign.

As bloggers we love social media.  Half the fun of blogging is being able to connect with others, to learn new things and to share your own information.

Social media allows for an amazing opportunity to reach people that otherwise you would have limited possibility of connecting with.

There are however difficulties within social media, and the main one is that it can completely suck your time if you are not careful.

You may have incredibly good intentions of spending an hour on your networks and before you know it, two or three have passed.  The question is how can you remain active and noticed on social media without spending all of your time there?

These time management tips will help you narrow down your focus for your social media campaign.

(Image courtesy of Stuart Miles / FreeDigitalPhotos.net)

5 Effective Time Management Tips

1. Know your purpose

One of the most important time management tips for your social media success has to be knowing your purpose.  Unless you know this, the rest is going to be an uphill battle.

Signing up for several social media accounts is not going to get you noticed.  What is your intention with these platforms?

Do you know WHY you are using them?

Do you even know HOW they can help you?

Lots of time can be wasted without knowing what your purpose is for each account.  You need to ‘get in’ and ‘get out’ and know that the time spent has been productive.

2. Set goals

I’ve talked before about setting goals for your site, and this is the same for your social media accounts.

What is it that you are trying to achieve with each of your social media platforms?

Do you even know what it is you want to achieve or are you posting blindly hoping that people will suddenly notice you?

Goals could be:

” I want to gain connections with other bloggers for guest posting opportunities”

” I want to be able to connect with a team of bloggers to share ideas and build our own community”

“I want to increase my social media followers by 50% in the next six months”

3. What is your social media plan?

It is not enough to simply have goals, you need to know how you are going to put them into action.

• How are you going to connect with bloggers for those guest posting opportunities?
• Are you planning on undertaking blog commenting for 3 months?
• Are you going to interact and share all the information they post to their platforms?
• What steps are you going to undertake to achieve your main goal?

Write them down.  Focus on them and be committed.

Neil Patel at Quick Sprout is fantastic at driving traffic to his site from social media.

Social media is alive, well and growing fast. There is a lot of traffic to be had from social sites, but you have to get creative. You can’t just rely on the old tactics people used three years ago; you need to start thinking outside the box.

Neil definitely has a plan for all his social media campaigns and he knows exactly what he is wanting to achieve.  He thinks outside the box and constantly assesses what works well and what doesn’t.

If a successful blogger like Neil needs a plan, do you think you can do without one?  You could try, but I doubt it will work!

4. Know how much time you have available

For most time management tips to be successful you need to first evaluate how much time you actually have available.  This will be different for everyone based on your own lifestyle and commitments.

If you are finding that you are getting lost in the realms of all things social media, then you need to allocate a certain amount of time you spend to it each day.

You may decide that you will turn off all other distractions for one hour each day and log into your accounts, focusing purely on the matters at hand.  This may be updating each of your accounts, or responding/sharing at least one item from someone else on all of your accounts.

Be careful that you make the distinction between your ‘personal’ and your ‘business’ social media networks.  It is very easy to see that personal message come through which you respond to, only then to find another 15 minutes of your precious time has disappeared.

Set the tasks that you want to achieve on each of your accounts, then asses how long each of those tasks will take you.

If you are really afraid that you wont be able to stay on track with your time allocation, then set a timer.  When the clock is up…..it’s up!  It won’t be long before you start to commit to the time allocations.

5. Evaluate what’s working and what’s not working well

Any changes you make are going to be tricky to implement.  If it was easy, you would have been doing it already!

Give things time before you decide whether something is working or not.  One or two days is not enough to determine whether your new strategy is going to be successful, and you will need to review this over a period of time.

You will however know if you are not achieving anything in the time you set for yourself, and if this is the case you need to examine why!

If after an hour, you have nothing to show, then it is likely you have either been procrastinating or maybe socialising a little too much!

Constant review will keep you on track.

In Summary

If you feel that social media is a giant ocean that is going to swallow you whole, there are steps you can take to avoid this.

Let’s recap the important things here.

1. Understand and know your purpose for what you want to achieve.
2. Set yourself goals with ALL your social media accounts.
3. What plans are you putting into place to achieve your goals?
4. How much time can you dedicate each day on your accounts and still be productive with all the other areas of blogging?
5. Are you evaluating what is working well, and what needs to be changed?

Now it’s your turn:

Do you have any time management tips to ensure you stay focused with your social media efforts?

What do you find works well with keeping yourself accountable to task?

Do you find that you waste hours in the social media cyber space?

Please share your thoughts with us below.