During my recent Social Interview reader Julie Hood from InfoMarketingOnline.com asked:
What are the best ways to manage your time with Twitter and Facebook without letting it take over the day?
I’ve been using Twitter for several months now. I use it nearly every day of the week in some way, and have fallen into a few patterns that help me stay in touch with Twitter without letting it overtake my entire day. Here are a few of my tips.
Let the stream pass you by
Twitter can sometimes be a slow trickle and other times be a fast torrent of information. It can be tempted to scroll backwards in your Twitter client and try to find out what everyone was Tweeting for the last several hours, but this will quickly burn up a lot of your free time.
The beauty of Twitter is that it taps you into the real time web. This means that what you are seeing on Twitter is generally relevant to a particular moment in time and becomes old news fast. If you haven’t logged into Twitter since the previous day just be content to see what your friends and followers are up to at that moment rather than spend a lot of time trying to trace back everything that happened while you were sleeping.
I guarantee you if its still important enough people will still be Twittering about it. Furthermore if you are keeping a well trimmed set of blogs and news sites in your RSS reader you will still catch up with the biggest news as people write full blog posts and articles about it.
Set aside certain times of day
I check Twitter every morning over breakfast just to see if anything hot is going on right then and there. When I am at work I keep a Twitter client running and just open it for a minute or so every hour to take a short mental break. In those few minutes I’ll send a Tweet, check my replies and DMs, read the last few minutes of the general stream, and reTweet anything I find interesting, then its back to work.
Turn off that Twitter client
Sometimes you just need to turn off all your Twitter clients and get down to doing some work. I find it much easier to write when my Twitter client isn’t beeping or chirping every time it has new updates. When my break time comes around I just fire it back up again for a few minutes.
Take the conversation to email
Twitter conversations can be fun and very valuable but there comes a time when a conversation should be taken out of Twitter and into email. Twitter replies and DMs are okay for conversations that last just a few short messages, but beyond that you can start getting into the sort of detail that requires more than one Tweet to get your message across. Take those conversations to email, another instant messaging app, or something else like Skype.
How do you manage your time with Twitter?
Got any tips on managing your Twitter time? Share them with us in the comments below.
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That’s some good advice. Personally I just check in with Twitter once in a while – for anyone who regularly tweets a lot of stuff that is relevant to me, I go and look at their tweets specifically.
I’ve actually found that I don’t read my RSS feeds as much anymore, as I’m picking up so many interesting blog posts just from Twitter and I trust the important ones will usually find me that way!
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