Seven Time Management Tips for Twitter

Is tweeting taking over your day? Karen Leland gathers up some valuable tips and tools to get it under control.

1. Syndicate your content automatically using Twitterfeed for tweets, Facebook's Notes app, Blog Link on LinkedIn and other networks. Denise Wakeman at www.BizTipsBlog.com recommends using Ping.fm to update her status simultaneously across sites.
2. ProBlogger's Darren Rowse counsels batch tweeting (and has plenty more advice on his TwiTip blog) -- put aside a block of Twitter time and write several at once, if possible. You can also schedule a time to visit sites and respond, and set a timer if you have difficulty stopping.
3. Identify the tools that will help your productivity, but don't get sucked into spending time assessing the latest, coolest thing. That just swallows up more time. Dana Lynn Smith recommends straightforward tools such as TweetDeck.com and twitterfeed.
4. IdeaLady Cathy Stucker recommends HootSuite.com, a quick way of sending out interesting links to your followers and scheduling tweets. It looks particularly useful for managing several accounts and monitoring your brand.
5. Focus on your ideal audience -- who do you want to reach, and does your bio tell those people enough about you and why they should want to follow you? George Kao, the source of this tip, also offers free introductory webinars on making more of your social media self.
6. Leland herself suggests grouping tool TweetLater, another option for scheduling automatic updates, linking together tweets and specifying which keywords you want to follow.
7. Be selective. Those big follower numbers may look enticing, but Leland has a really valuable quote from "The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur" author, Mike Michalowicz. "You want to follow and be followed by people who are following less than 100 people themselves. Otherwise it becomes a 'follow-fest,' and nobody is listening."

(Photo: digicla, CC2.0)