Social Media Apps and Productivity: Time Leak or Business Benefit? (Part 2)
In my previous post about social media apps, we talked about:
1) Is it necessary for you or your company?
2) How much time should you spend on social media apps?
Now it’s time to dive in to two more important questions.
3) If you have to use social media apps, is there an efficient way to do so?
There are social media management platforms like Hootsuite, Tweetdeck, Buffer, Social Flow, IFTTT, SocialOomph and Sprout Social. These can help you manage your platforms in one place, schedule posts, and track analytics.
You can schedule onto your calendar at which times of day you will check social media apps. When this activity is built into your schedule, you’re more likely to remember that you’re doing this for a finite amount of time, and you don’t have all day to spend in there. When folks use social media on a “pop in” basis, they tend to find themselves deep down in a rabbit hole more often.
Whether you use social media apps for business or for funsies, I recommend that you set a timer. The timer will remind you that it’s time to move on to the next task that you need to accomplish. (And you want to accomplish it so that you don’t feel guilty at the end of the day!)
4) How can you quit social media apps cold turkey?
After you crunch numbers, if you learn that your business does rely on social media for revenue generation and/or customer service, perhaps you shouldn’t quit it. But you can perhaps delegate it to someone else if you’ve grown weary of the overload.
If you find yourself with higher blood pressure levels after reading posts from riled up people on a variety of subjects, or you find yourself saying at the end of the day, “Where did my time go?!?” perhaps you do need to take a break from it.
To help you avoid the temptation of social media apps, move these icons to a rear screen on your device. When they’re on your home screen, the temptation is staring you right in the face. You’ll also want to turn off your notifications so that you’re not bothered throughout the day (which, by the way, totally interrupts your productivity).
A higher level strategy that I discuss in Chapter 23 of my book, The Inefficiency Assassin, is to understand what your high value tasks are. If in your case you find that social media is not a high value task in your business world or personal world, you can remind yourself of this whenever temptation strikes.
When you catch yourself wanting to jump on social media, ask yourself, “How will spending time on here benefit me?”
In the end, time management is all about mind management. And so is social media. When you wrap your brain around the benefits – or costs – of social media apps in your life, that will help you play and win the mind game.
For a great article by Gwen Moran on FastCompany.com about social media usage, click here.
For more info about how much time to spend on social media apps – and other productivity tools and tips – from time management trainer Helene Segura, click here.
