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.

©2012 Masterful Marketing. All Rights Reserved.

Eliminate Social Media Email Clutter is an original post from Debra Murphy, Small Business Marketing Coach: Masterful Marketing - Marketing in the New Media World. If you enjoyed this post, be sure to follow Debra on Twitter, Facebook or Google+.

Some people just are organized. Others need a bit of help staying focused. When it comes to managing your time given all the social media activities, the small business owner can get more than overwhelmed. I often get asked how I keep up with all of my social media activities and still get client work done (which does pay the bills!).

Two of the experts have provided their social media “systems”, showing you how they approach these activities.

• John Jantsch started this with his My Social Media System post and then asked others to share their systems as well.
• Chris Brogan then responded to being tagged by John and shared his workflow system.

As you can see, these two systems are very different and work for them. The point of both of their posts is to create a system that works for you, refine it as needed and eventually your social media strategy will become a habit. So let’s thank the above two folks (and others who have responded to John’s initial request) for suggesting we write down and share our systems, as I’m sure doing so will help us stick with it and make it a habit.

What helps me is to use my laptop for social media tools. It sits next to me on my desk with TweetDeck, Google, LinkedIn, Facebook, Friendfeed and other applications open in their own window so they don’t interfere with my client work that is on my desktop. I monitor these tools using the following system.

Daily:

Morning:

1. Check LinkedIn each morning for updates and questions
2. Check Facebook each morning for updates
3. Check Friendfeed and update my status across the social networks 

Continuous:

1. Check Twitter using TweetDeck every couple of hours (easy to organize groups and searches). Being open on the laptop, I can glance over to see who’s chatting and if interesting, join in.
2. Check email every couple of hours (clients send requests via email)
3. Monitor Friendfeed for updates and interesting conversations

Evening:

1. Scan Google Alerts blog feeds via Google Reader
2. Respond to Twitter followers – I check their profile to see if I want to follow back
3. Respond to LinkedIn connection requests
4. Respond to Facebook Friend requests
5. Subscribe to new friends on Friendfeed

Weekly (usually weekends):

1. Write blog posts for the week – schedule them to be published in the coming week
2. Tweak profiles across the many social media accounts
3. Check Webmaster tools for errors, issues needing fixing
4. Check Google analytics for information on traffic
5. Write a recommendation for a contact in LinkedIn, request one in return
6. Respond to other social media invitations

Being visible and participating in social media, like all marketing activities, takes time to reap the rewards. But if you come up with a system, and as John says, “work it day in and day out”, you will begin to understand what social media can and will do for your business as part of your marketing strategy.

Update: 2/14/09 – as I scanned my feed headlines in Google Reader I realized I didn’t incorporate reading and commenting on blogs into my personal social media system. That activity is normally part of my day and I will take a few minutes each morning and evening to scan, read those whose headline draws me in and comment when I have something to say. I also watch Twitter for notices of blog posts that seem interesting to me.

As with all plans, they are living and need to be modified. I will keep monitoring my use of social media and write an update to this as the system evolves.

©2012 Masterful Marketing. All Rights Reserved.

Develop a Social Media System is an original post from Debra Murphy, Small Business Marketing Coach: Masterful Marketing - Marketing in the New Media World. If you enjoyed this post, be sure to follow Debra on Twitter, Facebook or Google+.

One of the hardest exercises for business owners is to determine where they should focus and what they should abandon. Whether it’s determining their ideal target market, outsourcing tasks that don’t drive revenue or eliminating processes that take time and add no value, we all are guilty.

In Valeria Maltoni’s post “What Would You Give Up to Get Back?”, she got me thinking about what I’ve given up to get back some time. When she says:

For your brand, it’s not trying to be all things to all people. Instead, being more focused on the personality it already has and potentially aspire to the one it can achieve.

Business owners are sometimes afraid to focus for fear of leaving money on the table. But to try to be everything to everybody, you never achieve your true purpose, loving what you do and working with those who appreciate what your offer them.

We all make this mistake, usually in the early days of your business. The good news for me is that I tend to be pretty good at turning off the distractions so I can get the client work done (it pays the bills) before I work on my social media marketing plan. So although I’m not turning off Twitter or other social media tools, I do need to work on other areas that by streamlining or eliminating can add more hours to my day.

Here are some areas where I’ve eliminated the clutter and distractions so far this year:

• Eliminated formal contracts for an engagement letter. I recently converted my marketing services agreement to a client engagement letter. It covers the important aspects of my relationship with my clients, but it is much simpler.
• Focused my service offerings by developing value added packages. By offering value added packaged services, you make it easy for clients to select what they need and simplifies the engagement process. In addition, I’m transitioning my business to more of a coaching / mentoring service with selective consulting engagements giving me more control over my time.
• Reduced the amount of subcontracting through me. Sometimes you just have to subcontract out various efforts, but rather than invoice through my company, I’m trying to enable the subs to invoice the client directly. This will happen on a case by case basis depending on my working relationship with the other person. One of my differentiators is to not uplift other people’s rates for my clients, but this sometimes led to me invoicing a client where I didn’t make a dime.
• Unsubscribed from many email lists. Sorry folks, but my inbox has been reduce substantially. Offer an RSS feed option to your newsletter so that if I thought it was worthy of keeping, I could convert it over. My goal is to make email primarily a communication vehicle between me and clients. That way I can check email regularly, but avoid the distraction of reading “news”. I schedule some time throughout the day for that.
• Reduced in-person meetings with clients. Teleconferences work just fine for most of my client work. The value added service packages above are primarily delivered through teleconferences.

Share your suggestions about how you plan to recover a few more hours each week. The more the merrier because I need a few more hours available each week to work on my passion, get ready for the golf season and stay healthy and happy while doing so.

©2012 Masterful Marketing. All Rights Reserved.

Focusing Your Business is an original post from Debra Murphy, Small Business Marketing Coach: Masterful Marketing - Marketing in the New Media World. If you enjoyed this post, be sure to follow Debra on Twitter, Facebook or Google+.