Participate wisely in social media

- Social media is a powerful tool. It can help you grow your career, it can help you reconnect with long-lost friends, it has a tremendous impact on your focus, and focus is the name of the game when it comes to effective time management. So we want to use social media carefully and find balance in our life. I'm going to share with you a few tips to get the most out of social media but not be distracted by it. Number one is understand the purpose for which you're there.

Each social media site, LinkedIn, Facebook, has a different purpose. For instance, if you walk into the LinkedIn room you're there to build your career, if you walk into the Facebook room you're there to connect with friends, but often people go into these rooms of social media sites and lose their way, they forget why they're there and it becomes distracting so before you open up one of these sites understand clearly what you're there to do, that will help you maintain focus.

Number two is schedule time for yourself to use these sites. Rather than constantly jumping in and out you want to have a set time in your day or in your week to go in there. This will help you avoid switch tasking and be more productive throughout the day. Tip number three is curate carefully. Now what is a museum curator? They're the person who decides what is going to be displayed in the gallery. You also want to be in charge of what you are displaying on your social media feeds.

You can choose who to follow or not follow, you can choose what kind of posts you want to receive or not. If you know that your focus is pulled away every time you see something pop up from your favorite sports team, perhaps you should curate that and not see those feeds because they're too distracting. Number four is the flip side, post with caution. When you share something on a social media site it is in essence announcing something to the entire world.

Think carefully about what you want to share with someone because it's not easily undone. Just as I recommend with email that you count to ten before you send, I recommend that you count to ten before you post. Consider what you're sharing and think carefully about whether or not this has value and it's something you want to make known to everyone. Number five is schedule your posts. Now you may have certain times of the day or week when you are very prolific in creating lots of social media ideas, you can use tools to manage when those posts appear so that people who are following you don't get overwhelmed.

These are often called social media aggregators, some examples include Hootsuite or SocialOomph. The idea is that you can load them up with lots of posts and then it sends them out at strategic times during the day or week. If you want to dive deeper into this subject you might want to check out the course How to Rock Social Media here on the Library. Focus is a powerful tool when it comes to effective time management, how you use social media will have a great influence on where that focus goes.