Untangling Social Media Networks

Do all of these social media networks make you dizzy? Do you have the feeling that you are lost in a maze of blogs, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google Buzz, Four Square etc? Posts are everywhere and sometimes they are repeating the same things. It may annoy your followers and friends and eventually you will get ignored. It doesn’t have to be this way when you know how to simplify and untangle the links that join social media networks together.

I’d like to show you one simple way to link the connections between your social media accounts so that you do less work and still spread your efforts to these social media channels.

1. Blog – This is where you provide value to others by sharing your view point, expertise and experience.  Blogging is also a great way to get organic traffic from search engines and allows others to reference to your posts.
2. Twitter is the springboard and the broadcaster of your social media networks.  Connect your blog to your twitter accounts to make your blog automatically send messages to other social channels you have.
3. LinkedIn has partnered with Twitter. When you set your Twitter name in your LinkedIn account, your tweets will automatically update your LinkedIn status. You can also add your blog’s RSS feed to one of the link in your LinkedIn profile and add Blog Link app to your LinkedIn account to share your blog posts with your connections.
4. Facebook – I don’t think I need to explain much about Facebook. For me, it’s primarily for my personal network of family, relatives and close friends. By connecting your Twitter announcements to Facebook, it can automatically add your twitter to your Facebook status.
5. Google Buzz is the newcomer but not many people understand it yet. To make it work, you’ll want to create your own Google Profile. You then connect your Twitter account to your Google profile and Google Buzz to broadcast your status to your Buzz connection. The Buzz network usually consists of family and friends who use Gmail as their personal email platform. One feature of Google Buzz is that it allows you to share the items from your Google Reader and Blogger account through Buzz network.

Following are the tools that you can use to make the job of untangling your social media network easier:

HootSuite is a powerful tool to manage all your social media accounts. It can post messages to  multiple Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Four Square accounts. It also can connect with your WordPress and RSS.

DISQUS Comments: When you install DISQUS Comments on your blog, it replaces your regular comment forms. Your visitors can then use one of the social media accounts they already have to post comments. It will authenticate their identity to ensure quality comments. It will prevent opening up the blog to spam.

WordPress to Twitter plugins: There are a number of plugins to allow you to connect and broadcast your blog to your Twitter account. Most of them will also allow you to connect to shorten URL app and properly layout your tweets.

Everyone is talking about how to leverage and harness the power of social media but it can appear quite overwhelming. By taking simple steps to ensure the proper linkage of the connections, you can do less AND reap the benefits of the social media networks.

Time Management and Productivity

I've received some great advices on time management and productivity from my mentors throughout my career. Here is a small list I found valuable.

• Build a Default Time Schedule
• Do hardest stuff at your most productive time – for most, this is the morning
• Schedule things that require concentration at your best quiet time – this may be end of day, or even at home
• A way to get back some time is to use lunch to eat and meet
• Have regular meetings at beginning or end of day, so as to break up the day.

Saving even 10% each week by doing this is 4 hours, EVERY week. Which is 17 hours each month, so that we don’t have to work late/weekends to catch up to. Not to mention better performance, which leads to better compensation.

Jim Estill is the master of time management that I follow closely. You will find a lot of great info on business and time leadership on his website.