3 Ways to Avoid Online Distractions

While social media sites such as YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn undoubtedly have their benefits, being active on all of them can take up too much of your time.

Don’t feel under pressure to participate in every single social media platform – it can become addictive and before you know it, you’ll be doing little else!

Below are three ways you can avoid social media meltdown and spend more time on what really matters – running your business.

Don’t be active on every social media site

It seems barely a month goes by without another new kid on the social media block being launched. As the owner of a small business you can’t afford to get bogged down in all of these. Yes there are people who would advocate doing just that but as a small business owner time is precious.

My advice is to try out a few of the main social media sites for a week or two and then assess which one you like using most and which brings the best results. Of course you need to have a clear idea of what it is you want to achieve before you start, is it more online orders, to raise your profile or to drive more traffic to your website?

Assign a set time of day to check and post updates

The trouble with social media platforms such as Twitter are they are do fast-paced you could literally spend all day on them reading other people’s content and sharing your own.

As a small business it’s unlikely you’ll be getting lots of mentions and requests for help, unlike say, a company like T-Mobile.

With this in mind, you should just assign a certain amount of time each day to check your social media account and try to do this at the same time each day.

Focus on what you do best

If you’re not really into computers or social media, don’t beat yourself up about it. If you prefer going to face-to-face networking meetings to try to win business, then do that.

If you don’t know what you’re doing on sites like Twitter and Facebook, this will come across to other users. Remember it’s your business and you can choose what you want and don’t want to do.

The key thing to take from this is to do what you enjoy as this will more than likely benefit your business more than being on social media because you feel you have to be.

If you liked this article you may also want to read: is using Twitter harming your business?

This entry was posted on Monday, March 28th, 2011 at 9:00 am and is filed under Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.