SIMPLIFY Your Social Media Communications, especially for LinkedIn Users

LinkedIn is easy, Social Media is hard!

We say that over and over and it becomes quite apparent in our LinkedIn sales trainings. We get asked to explain social media even in LinkedIn class. It’s now part of the curriculum.

Is this your life now?

Communications are coming in from ever direction

Is it a Message, an Invite, a Request, a Recommendation, a Request FOR a Recommendation, an Update, a Post, a Comment, a Reply, a List?

The terminology is a mess!

Are you a Friend, a Fan, a Connection, a 1, a 2, a 3, a Follower, a “Followee”, a Subscriber, a Liker, a “Likee”, WHEW!!

Here are a few helpful techniques that I personally use to get by until a technical solution emerges:

LinkedIn

I have my LinkedIn communications settings set so that few communications come to me as individual emails. I only receive messages from the 4 groups I manage. I am on LinkedIn all the time, even on the iPhone. Still, if you check in daily, this communication technique is a good one.

I disconnect from people that over-communicate and are NOT in any way strategic. They are not notified. I have deleted 2,500 people form my network to stay under 30,000 so I really know this one. When “removing connection” the only information LinkedIn gives you is their First Name and Last Name.

Facebook

As with LinkedIn, I disconnect from people that over-communicate and are NOT in any way strategic. I “unlike” Pages that over-communicate as well. They are not notified. I’ve deleted 1,500 Friends and at least 500 Pages to stay under the 5,000 limit.

Did you know that Page “Likes” count against the 5,000 Friend limit? Yep. If you “fill up” like I did, the first place to start shedding is Pages!

Avoid the massive picture Tags. They seem like a scams, waste your time and fill your InBox needlessly. “Untag” yourself in them. This is especially big around the holidays.

Twitter

Use tools like Hootsuite or TweetDeck to organize yourself, schedule your Tweets, views conversations (nice!), view select Tweets based on Who, keywords, hashtags and several others. I hope that these quick ideas help you get Social Media communications under control a little bit better. They help me and I am still swamped much of the time. Still, my life is a little more extreme in this area so don’t let it scare YOU rom getting involved with Social Media.

Rock on!