Managing My Social Media World and Staying Employed at the Same Time

The following question came up today,  “How do you tweet and post so much and get your job done?”  Since it came up once I thought it might come up again and it might come to one of you in the form of “How can the idiot IT director do his job when he is spending all his time on social media.”  Here is the answer.

I do use many aggregation and sharing tools. Most of it is automated with a sprinkling of live tweets.  However, every single tweet is something I have either scanned or read.

Because there is so much to learn in the IT field every single day I long ago started using tools such as Google Reader to glean and filter topics in areas such as higher ed, community college, finance, the economy and of course IT.  I had started looking at and experimenting with other aggregation tools prior to Google’s announcement that Google Reader was going away.  That announcement just turned into an opportunity for me to refresh some of my thoughts on aggregation and distribution of news via social media.   Here is how I go about it.
1) I use about a half dozen aggregators that go out to the web and glean articles and papers on topics such as those listed above.  I then use another tool to aggregate my aggregators to a single location.
2) From that single aggregation point  I usually spend the following time looking for interesting content:
15 -30 minutes first thing in the morning scanning and marking content.
15-30 minutes at lunch scanning and marking content
1 hour at night before going to bed scanning and marking content
1-3 hours Saturday morning scanning and marking content
3) When I find a piece of content I believe might be interesting and which is not time dependent I push it to another tool(s) that schedules tweets and Linkedin posts

Bitly

Bitly is a free URL shortening service that also offers analytics and sharing tools. If you are unfamiliar with the term URL shortener, it is a service that redirects a user from a
short url (ex.http://bit.ly/14Bx4kD) to a much longer url
Buffer is an automated posting tool for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and App.net that allows you to share to multiple accounts, all from one place and at optimal times. I almost feel like I should warn you to not get me started on Buffer, but I won’t because it is currently my favorite, and maybe my all time favorite, social media management tool.
Why I Love Buffer
They also offer a free version that allows you to add three accounts. However, for $10/mo. (less than the price of lunch!) you can add up to 12 social accounts, unlimited posts, and access for 2 team members for an entire month. Account options are: Facebook (profiles and pages), Twitter, LinkedIn and even App.net.
Why you’ll love Buffer

1. Get Analytics for each social update you share: Clicks, retweets, likes, shares, mentions and more. – See screenshot below.
2. Get your posts automatically timed and scheduled, so you never have to worry about setting a time and date. Just hit “add to Buffer”.
3. Add updates to your Buffer from lots of different apps or via email.

Therefore all day while I am doing something else,  tweets and linkedin posts are being automatically pushed out by me.  Then occasionally if I am looking something up I will push it out, but if I push something out live I sometimes will put it in a que for a retweet at a later time.