Organizing your Social Media

To get the most out of your social media network, it is important to be engaged, organized and up-to-date. And if you’re working a budget, free tools can be your best friends. Below are some quick, free resources to help manage your social media and stay organized.

Facebook Friends Lists
-This will help you filter and decrease the amount of noise in your newsfeed. For example, you can assign your family to one list and your coworkers to another list. You can also set different security settings for each list if you wish.

YouTube Likes and Favorites
-This will help drive your YouTube personality and is a great place to keep all of your favorite YouTube videos, so you don’t have to keep looking them up in the YouTube search.

Twitter Lists
-Lists help organize who you are following. They separate users into specific categories. You can then filter by the List to see only what these specific users are tweeting. Lists make it easier to absorb information on your feed and eliminate noise.
-You can also choose to follow other users’ lists without creating your own. So, if someone created a “sports” list that you like, you can choose to follow that list instead of everyone individually.

Tweetdeck and Hootsuite (Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn)
-These tools integrate your Twitter account and organize it by lists you create such as newsfeed, mentions, direct messages, etc.
-Hootsuite can integrate other social networks as a way to manage all of your social media accounts from one location.
-Note: Personally, I like to login to Facebook and LinkedIn and manage these accounts directly from the platforms, and I use Hootsuite solely for Twitter.

Google Reader (RSS Feeds/Blogs)
-This is a great way to organize your blogs without typing in each address, scanning through each of your favorite sites or saving them to your bookmark bar.
-Google Reader organizes your blogs into sections for easy reading and scrolling. It will also tell you the number of new blog posts since the last time you visited your account.

If you don’t have time to sift through an endless sea of information, I recommend using at least some of these tools. Hopefully, they will help organize your social media presence. The features and dashboards for each tool is relatively simple, so don’t be afraid of a big learning curve.  They will make your time spent online much more efficient. And since they are free, there is no reason not to use them.