As you get more active in social media, one of the things you will notice is the increase in email notifications from the various tools. Having these emails flood your inbox is both distracting and cumbersome to manage.
The first thing you learn about being involved in a social media community is that you don’t need to respond immediately, but you do need to respond in a timely manner. A few months ago, I wrote a post on setting up your social media system, so that you can make time for marketing using social media.
So what I recommend is you take advantage of one of the most useful features of an email client – the ability to set up filters – so you can make your social media system more productive. If you haven’t found that feature in your particular client, look for it and then set up filters to move these notification emails into the appropriate folders. In Microsoft Outlook, you can find this feature under “Tools / Rules and Alerts …”. In Gmail, you’ll find the filters under “More actions / Filter messages like these”.
My preference is to have separate folders set up for Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn as I have also set a priority on how I manage these emails coming from these three social media networks. You may find that filtering all social media emails into one social media folder is sufficient, especially if you are just getting involved in social media. Once again, the choice is yours based on how you work and what type of time you have to dedicate to vetting Twitter followers, answering Friend requests on Facebook or accepting connections on LinkedIn.
Once you set these up, you then can set up specific times in your day to puruse these folders and take action. You will find you are much more productive this way rather than being reactive to every email that comes in.
More From Debra Murphy – Masterful Marketing
- Social Media Marketing is Part of an Integrated Marketing Plan
- Social Media Marketing – Create Outposts to Drive Inbound Traffic
- Social Media Marketing – Myths or Reality?
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