Viralogy

Work prioritization is the age-old battle between procrastination and productivity. From water cooler conversations to 200-slide PowerPoint presentations, there are hundreds of hourly events that ruin productivity offline. However, they’re nothing compared to the potential pitfalls online. From email to Facebook, there are thousands upon thousands of ways to kill your productivity online. The Social Media Tactic I’d like to talk about this week is the importance of prioritizing social media tasks.

Social Media Tactics discusses various ways social and new media users build relationships and add value to their audience. Each week, we will look at one social media influencer that has managed to use web marketing successfully. In Social Media Tactics, we’ll show you some of the best ways to enhance your own brand and social media presence while demonstrating how many savvy users employ social media tactics.

Social Media has opened up an entirely new can of worms when it comes to productivity killers and disruptions. Services like Twitter and Friendfeed have created an INDUSTRY where interruption masquerades as productivity. Managing social media productivity gives a user a powerful upper hand, as it allows them to spend more time providing value and working creatively and less time being drowned by information overload.

With Twitter, it is extremely easy to worry about focusing on the thousands posting in your Tweetstream, tuning in and out at random intervals during any given workday. The problem is, like everything else, picking away at a work task slowly is inefficient and unproductive. Tim Ferriss wrote a great post about how to check email twice a day, and I believe it absolutely holds true for Twitter and social networks.*
*If your job is customer service or support using social networks, you absolutely have to be there all the time. There’s no way around that. This is for people who use social media as a separate tool for additional marketing or social media measurement.

The key to controlling social media productivity is very similar to controlling any other type of task – batch the job and create a separate time to work on it. By setting aside a specific time to analyze your social media stream, you can be far more efficient. Amber Naslund put together a great list of principles to help you manage your time (on social media) better.

So how do we batch our social media tasks in a way to control information overload and effectively manage the constant interruption of social media? Patience, willpower and tools.

There are a plethora of tools available for you to manage your social media presence capably. The problem is that most people either a) don’t use them, or b) don’t know how to leverage them correctly. Social Oomph (formerly TweetLater), does a great job of helping you plan out your tweets so that you’re not sporadically posting them throughout the day. I’m not saying get rid of the spontaneity; just organize yourself a little better. It will help to spread out your most interesting nuggets in the process as well, exposing more people to your tweets. By doing this, you can then use a program like TweetDeck to pay attention your Tweetstream a few times a day, rather than once every 15 minutes. One of the reasons I only follow 200 people is that I can now take a half hour to catch up on a large percentage of the previous tweets, look at interesting articles, etc. However, you can do the same thing by creating groups using TweetDeck, or even using Twitter Lists for people important to you.

To monitor mentions of your product or website, sure, set up a Google Alert, but don’t have it inform you as it happens. Receive a digest that you can read once a day (or week); maybe at the start of your day, as you plan out your day’s work. Same goes for Facebook or other types of updates. The issue can most likely wait a few hours unless you recently launched a product or are in the midst of a major PR debacle.

Patience is hard too. You’ll want to check everything IMMEDIATELY. We’ve truly become a society that depends on instantaneous knowledge. So the pressure to hear about things first will be difficult to ignore. That’s where your willpower comes in. A little patience pays off as you will be able to much more effectively handle information once you’ve digested it. And responding to every single tweet as it happens or every single article as it’s posted can often be a mistake in two ways. One, you’ll quickly disrupt the flow of your work and divide your focus to an ancillary task. Two, in an effort to be timely, you’ll be responding without all of the information. Let instant response be the work of the @ComcastCares team. You will most likely not need to be as quick to respond.

Managing your priorities may not be fun, but if you can learn how to batch tasks effectively, you will complete your social media tasks much more efficiently. And that will give you more time to do the fun things that you enjoy, and that matter most to your business/brand. As you successfully prioritize your social media workflow, I promise that your procrastination will wane, and your productivity will increase.

Chris Brogan made a great point a few years back:

I [procrastinate] often at work. I often burn more cycles on something that’s interesting to me, but not necessarily paramount to the job at hand. It would really do me well to have a don’t do list at work… try and identify some things you want to stop doing because they take away from the things that matter most to you.

What little things create the biggest productivity issues and cause you to procrastinate the most? How do you handle social media’s effect on your performance?

Jaremy writes a technology, marketing and gaming blog. His attempts to alliterate are able to annoy just about anyone, but his aspirations for absurd and awe-inspiring alliteration are ultimately altruistic.