For most, social media is a way of staying connected with friends, family and customers/prospects. For some it’s an addiction that can lead to very unhealthy procrastination.

Here are 6 ways to take back control of your daily schedule!

Clarify your goals before you engage in social media

If I don’t figure out what I want from my social media endeavors before I start, I can easily find myself retweeting and updating my status 3 or 4 hours later. There is so much good quality content out there that I can literally stay glued to my screen all day doing nothing specific at all.

Are you the same?

If so, before you open any social media site or tool, realize that you also have other activities that need doing before the end of the day.

Make sure you have a goal, be it to respond to all of your messages, seek out new leads for your business or to research for new blog post material… and then stick to it.

Give yourself a strict time frame to reply to messages

There’s nothing better than being super efficient in responding to hundreds of tweets and Facebook messages. This gives you more time to focus on tweeting high quality content and working on your Twitter business rather than in it.

Set your alarm clock for a reasonable time frame to respond to your messages. When the alarm sounds - stop immediately and move onto your next task.

The more you do this, the better you will get at it and sooner or later it will be like clockwork (never mind the pun).

Twitter Profile RSS Feed Subscription

Subscribe to important feeds by RSS

I’ve had someone ask me before how they could get everything that I tweet delivered to them in a neat package without having to visit my Twitter profile (I also think that the Twitter profile page is a pretty annoying interface).

The best way to do this is to subscribe to the RSS feed on a Twitter profile.

You can get this feed delivered to 3rd party RSS readers – I prefer Google Reader.

This way, at the end of the day, you can log into your reader and view quickly all of the tweets that they have made during the day. This is an awesome method of staying “in the loop” without having to go through the Twitter interface or a 3rd party software application that could potentially lead to a productivity meltdown!

I talk more about how to use RSS feeds with Twitter in 5 Ways to Generate More Leads with Twitter.

Use  a 3rd party application to consolidate accounts & group users

Having more than two social media accounts can get a little hard to manage, especially if you have them on the same website.

Why not try out Tweetdeck or Seesmic? They allow integration of multiple Twitter accounts and a Facebook account. Moreover, what you can do with these applications is create “Groups” in which you can place a selection of your contacts. For example, I have a “Favorites” group, which hosts all of the tweeps I like to connect with on a daily basis. This way, I save time by checking my favorites column first.

Seesmic Twitter Favorites Group

Follow active social media users

When you follow or add users you may be in fact adding an empty account. A report from Harvard Business Review in June this year revealed that around 10% of all Twitter users account for 90% of the activity on the network. That means a lot of inactive accounts floating around and a lot of wasted time if you’re going to try to engage them.

Check when they last updated their accounts before you follow/add anyone. They may have udpated in the last 30 mins (good) or in the last year (bad).

Last but not least, close all your social media tools when you’re not supposed to be using them

Keeping social media sites & applications open after we’ve spent the whole morning using them is a temptation we need to avoid if we’re going to get any work done. It’s too easy to get distracted every 5 minutes (or even 2!) if we have many followers or friends in our social circles.

We’ve all been guilty of this… but let’s be honest – it has to stop.

The trouble is, now that there’s more ways of staying connected there are also new ways of being notified!

The best thing to do to stay out of this tricky procrastination trap is to close ALL the applications that notify you of anything. If you absolutely must leave them on (e.g. Meebo – live chat sessions on websites) then just turn off the notifications alone. You’ll still be logged in and so you won’t lose any coverage.

Conclusion

Using social media without a clear goal or focus can leave your schedule screwed up. Social media has the uncanny ability to spread into areas of your day that are supposed to be dedicated to other activities.

Stay on target by keeping track of time, consolidating your efforts, being clear on what you need to accomplish and remembering to close all social media apps when you’re finished using them!

If you know someone that suffers from a social media addiction, share this article with them!

Related posts:

1. How to Use SavorChat to Boost Your Social Media Branding & Productivity
2. 5 Ways to Generate More Leads with Twitter
3. Social Media Marketing: Why You’re Better Off to DIY
4. Marketing with Social Media – What Michael Jackson, Iran & Domino’s Pizza Have in Common
5. Social Media Marketing Interview with Mike Stelzner