Why is it that social media marketing seems to take up so much of our time? It’s so easy to pop on to Twitter or Facebook for “just a few minutes” only to find hours later that it has sucked you in and kept you away from that other work you should have been doing.

I don’t by any stretch of the imagination claim to have mastered the art of social media time management, but I thought I’d share some tips with you to help minimise the amount of wasted time spent on social media sites without giving up on social media marketing altogether!

• Stick to a schedule – decide in advance exactly what you want to accomplish on each social media platform each day and how long it should take you then schedule that exact time into your calendar. Avoid checking your accounts on an ad hoc basis as this inevitably leads to time wastage.
• Plan cleverly – schedule your social media time before meetings or appointments so you can’t get carried away.
• Minimise the distractions – figure out what distracts you the most and take steps to control it. For instance create a shortcut to take you straight to your Facebook business page without going via your personal account if it’s too tempting to click on those personal notifications.
• Use timesaving tools – using a tool such as Hootsuite or Social Oomph to schedule some of your tweets and updates in advance can help you to go into your accounts less often and thereby minimise distraction. A simple alarm set on a timer can also help remind you when you’ve spent enough time on a task.
• Create content in bulk – sometimes it can be more efficient to create your content in batches, e.g. cranking out a number of blog posts at once or researching several interesting news links to share on Twitter or Facebook, then use a tool like those mentioned above to post them out at regular intervals.

Do you have any other tips to share with us on how to save time on social media marketing?

I found the recent news about how a writer is being sued by his former employer for his 17,000 Twitter followers really interesting. What struck me most was how they’d put a value of $2.50 on each follower, which seems quite bizarre, and it got me thinking about the value of my own Twitter followers in the various accounts I have.

The thing is though, that not all followers are equal. Some follow you because they want to hear what you have to say, others because you share content that their followers would be interested in, but there are still a large majority that randomly follow shedloads of people in the hope that they’ll be followed back. Others follow you then lose interest in Twitter and stop visiting, so never see anything you tweet anyway.

I’m increasingly of the opinion that the quality of your followers is much more important than the quantity if you are using Twitter as a marketing tool. Particularly if you have a niche business, a few followers who are truly interested in your tweets are much more valuable than a lot who aren’t.

Obviously you don’t have an awful lot of control over who follows you, only who you follow, but being discerning about whom you follow will play a part in the type of followers you attract, as will the type of tweets you send out and whether you’re engaging with others.

A couple of tools I’ve found useful in cleaning out my Twitter account are:

• Twitcleaner works by showing you who you’re following that isn’t worth bothering with, e.g. because they never converse, they haven’t been active for a while, etc. You will lose a few followers as a result (those who only follow people to get followed back) but this isn’t a bad thing as they weren’t interested in what you have to say anyway.
• who.unfollowed.me is a useful little tool for tracking who has unfollowed you, who isn’t following you back and who you aren’t following back and there is a free version which is perfectly adequate. Initially I thought it was only useful for those who won’t follow anyone who doesn’t follow them back but I’ve found it makes checking through your followers and those you follow much more efficient.

So go on, don’t be afraid to have a bit of a clearout, as any followers you lose as a result weren’t worth having in the first place. You’ll enjoy Twitter more if you’re only following interesting people and you’ll gradually build a higher quality list of followers too.

Similar to SlideShare, authorSTREAM allows you to share your PowerPoint presentations on the web.

You will need to create an account in order to use it. Once you’ve done this you can upload a multimedia presentation you’ve created in PowerPoint and authorSTREAM will convert it to Flash format and display it on a unique URL.

Social bookmarking has been around for a while now, but not everyone understands how to make the most of it. Here’s an overview as well as some tips on how to use it effectively for business.

What is social bookmarking?

Most people are used to bookmarking web pages on their browser to refer to later; social bookmarking takes this a step further by allowing you to save these pages to a public website. This means that not only can you access them from any computer, but you can also share them with your friends and connections. It’s a useful way to organise, store and manage your bookmarks and a great way to share yours and find other people’s bookmarks of resources online.

Crowdsourcing is basically the art of outsourcing business tasks to a community outside of you business, so it’s pretty much using ‘crowds’ to ‘source’ solutions to your problems.  There has been a trend towards crowdsourcing recently, mainly due to Web 2.0 technologies making it easy to do.  It allows you to leverage a wide pool of resources quickly and simply.

Crowdsourcing for business

More recently businesses have been more aware of the benefits that crowdsourcing can bring, here are some examples of how you can use it in your business: