How many times have you succumbed to the temptations of spending too much time on your Facebook feeds or jumping from video to video on YouTube only to realize that you weren’t being productive at all? This doesn’t have to be the case when managing your company’s social media pages.

We can all enjoy our quirks on social media while maintaining a certain level of productivity. Here are some tips on how you can manage your time more productively to make your social media management experience a fruitful one.

#1: Identify Social Media Channels That Are Effective

It is understandable that you would want to engage yourself in as many avenues of social media as you can to branch out your company’s social presence. Although, this technique may prove to be counterproductive when you allot time and effort on mediums that don’t necessarily yield favourable output.

Try to assess and evaluate the response of your market so you can accurately discern on how to appropriately divide your time. It is advisable that you fully dedicate yourself to select modes of media as opposed to half-heartedly working across multiple media platforms. Remember, it is better to hit the bull’s-eye of a single target as opposed to merely scraping the edges of multiple targets. Quality over quantity.

#2: Set Specific Time Periods For Your Social Media Tasks

One of the disadvantages of using social media is how easy it is to be lured away from productivity. You should learn how to effectively plot your social media usage by scheduling specific tasks during dedicated time periods of the workday. For instance, establish a certain time frame at different points of the day for checking and responding to notifications. Allot one hour of the day for publishing your posts and another hour for commenting on existing threads. Spend a couple of hours studying your markets’ trends.

These are only suggestions and you can choose to be flexible with how you manage your time, but it always proves to be fruitful when you are able to streamline and organize your tasks accordingly.

#3: Be Consistent In Your Routine

When you consistently perform your online tasks in a religious manner, this can benefit you substantially. Once you establish a routine and dedicate yourself to the perfection of your daily responsibilities, you progressively improve your performance. Like a daily exercise routine, if you do your work more habitually, it becomes more natural to you. In addition, your market will always respond more positively when you are consistent with your approach.

#4: Use Tools That Help You Aggregate Your Social Media Platforms

Surely, you are familiar with the adage “hitting two birds with one stone”. Oftentimes, your work may become redundant when working across multiple social media platforms. It is helpful if you make use of tools that can assist you in aggregating the content of your social media feeds to avoid overlapping data and repetitious tasks.

Why upload the same post on Twitter, Facebook and Google + separately when there are tools that enable you to upload to all three at the same time? Some examples of tools that you can make use of are, Hootsuite, Summify and TubeMogul.

#5: Make Most of Your Time by Going Mobile

With the smartphones and tablets, you have been provided with the opportunity to access your social media platforms at any given time and place. With mobile its easy to keep tabs on your favourite services, you can get on your phone and respond to Facebook Notifications, Or you can do a quick check-up on the viewing statistics of that YouTube video you uploaded. Make the most of your idle time with mobile. After all, you know what they say: Time is Money.

Social Media can be seen as either a beauty or a burden… maybe even both. Will the use of Social Media make you more effective? There really is no certainty, only opportunity. It all purely depends on how you make use of it.

Do try out these 5 tips, and let me know how it increased your productivity and efficiency in Social Media Management. If you found this article helpful, don’t forget to share it with others who you think will benefit from it.