verve: in bloom

Over at my blog, PRos in Training, I’ve been sharing my top 5 social media management shortcuts. For you, I offer a recap of the five tips. You can click on each to read in full.

I’m often asked about how to best handle social media maintenance and management tasks. Over four years or so I’ve developed a few shortcuts that work well for me.

#1: Use a Feedreader

Yay feedreaders!

Using a feedreader to track blogs I’m interested in along with keyword searches is my number one shortcut. It was thanks to Bloglines, my first feedreader that I really started to understand social media. I subscribed to PR, social media, marketing and advertising blogs left and right. By doing so, I learned best practices and social media etiquette through observation.

#2: Create a Process

The cost of social media isn’t in the hard costs, it’s in the time costs. Creating a process for yourself will help save time and also make social media activities a part of your routine.

I find it challenging to share my personal process because I’ve developed it over more than four years. So take what you think will work and modify the rest to work for you. The point is to have a process, not replicate my process.

My process basically breaks down into three categories – making time to track, time to write and time to play.

#3: Use Twitter

You can’t possibly subscribe to every blog on your topics of interest. Using feedreaders and Twitter in a complementary way will help you stay in the know and also save you time. To make Twitter work focus on: finding the right people to follow, building lists and mastering third party applications.

#4: Use a Smartphone

If you’re in communications (and if you own or manage a business or lead a nonprofit, you are!) – get a smart phone. For real. It doesn’t have to be an iPhone. Just get a smart phone.

A quick scan of Twitter or Facebook, a timely update to your Tumblr or blog, even being able to handle an urgent situation are all possible from the palm of your hand. Knowing I can “hear” if someone is talking to me (or a client) saves me a ton of time.

#5: Try Stuff!

Don’t be afraid to try stuff out and seek out new tools. The more you explore and learn the ins and out, ups and downs of social media and web 2.0, the better you’ll be about deciding what makes sense for you.

Trying stuff is the best part about social media.Sometimes I cringe when there’s a new tool on everyone’s lips, wondering how I’m going to find the time to manage one. more. thing. But that’s my job! To try it out and figure it out and decide if it’s worth integrating into my work or not. Ultimately, it’s not a chore, but a new challenge.

I hope you find this useful. I’d love to hear your best shortcuts, too.

image by laughlin