Keeping Your Social Media Organized
February 16, 2009 by
Adam
Filed under
Productivity, SEO & Rank
If you are like me you jumped into social media with both feet, taking recommendations from friends about which sites were the best to participate on. Before I knew it, I had membership on more than forty social networking sites—everything from MySpace and Facebook to YouTube and FLICKR. There is really no end to the number of sites you can join. In fact, Mashable.com has compiled a monster list of 350 established social networking sites (http://mashable.com/2007/10/23/social-networking-god/) catering to every community imaginable. In addition to being part of your networking many use these sites for strategically marketing their products or services.
But after a while, it can become overwhelming. Every site has its own login and password. They all have their own protocol and it can be exhausting trying to keep up with posting on them all. That’s why I’d like to offer three tips for managing your social media to be able to make the most of it.
1. Focus
Just because you can join 50 social networking sites doesn’t mean you should. The key to social networking is being social. If you don’t have time to interact with your contacts, you’re just another name on a list of their friends. It is important to isolate which of these sites have the kind of people you want to appeal to and focus your efforts there. For example, if you are a musician, MySpace is probably a lot more effective than LinkedIn which is used more for professionals. Learning about the demographics of each of the social networking sites will help you decide if you will be able to have an impact with your presence.
2. Use a Spreadsheet
Until someone comes up with a way to keep all your social networking information in one place, I highly recommend using a spreadsheet to keep track of all the sites where you regularly participate. Logins, passwords, URL’s, and notes that can help you keep yourself organized are best compiled in one sheet which you can access at all times.
3. Make a Schedule
Having a plan for using social media is very important. Hit or miss participation on these sites will produce the same kinds of results. If you hope to see anything from your social media efforts, you must be consistent. John Jantsch wrote an excellent post on his blog Duct Tape Marketing called My Social Media System (http://www.ducttapemarketing.com/blog/2009/01/22/my-social-media-system/) where he outlines the sites he uses, and the schedule he has created to keep up with them. Some of these social media sites, such as Twitter, move at a much faster pace than others. That means you want to make an effort to visit them more frequently and keep updated daily, or even multiple times a day.
There is a fine balance that must be struck between the number of sites you choose to participate on, and the amount of time and energy you have to develop real, meaningful contacts. The key to social media is quality, not quantity. Social media members are very sensitive to spam and traditional selling techniques. Simply logging in once a month and doing a fly by with a bunch of self-promoting posts is not going to gain you a favorable response; and in fact will work against you in this instance.
Do you have any tips for keeping your social network efforts organized and effective? Leave a comment and let us know!
It’s hard to decide which social network sites to belong to, but I love your suggestion of tracking it all and scheduling time.
Please do NOT use a spreadsheet to keep all your links and passwords in. that is extremely dangerous.
For a single (and secure) list that you can access at all times, use a dedicated password manager. They are custom built to make finding things easy, without running the risks of keeping passwords in the clear (or worse) reusing the same ones.
Passpack is an online password manager. It’s free - http://www.passpack.com
That’s my company, so I have a biased towards it. But there are plenty of programs out there, so you can shop around if you’d like. But whatever you do, be safe: choose - and use - a password manager.
Tara Kelly
Passpack Founding Partner
Its always good to keep organized, and a spreadsheet is a great way to keep track of all the social media and things going on. Its a great idea.
If you are going to try to be on more than 2-3 social networks at a time, and really get involved with them, I can’t stress how important setting a schedule is. Without a schedule and some time constraints you can spend hours on your networking sites and never accomplish anything. Scheduling helps you stay focused and get more out of the sites you participate on.
Good tips,
Matt
really your time management tips and suggestion are very informative.Scheduling management improve our focus on the sites..
Use a spreadsheet? You can’t be serious! There’s plenty of single-sign-in solutions out there if you really must go down that track. They install on your desktop, and securely store all your logins behind a single login.
The most important changes to the interface are connected with the new ability to group your friends into different lists. While most of the navigational elements of the regular version were on the top of the page, the new beta moves all of these elements to the right.
I Need to try the scheduling thing for sure.
Spreadsheets….Maybe I’ll try it.
Any thoughts on Passpack?
Passpack is excellent I’ve used it for probably a year at least and it is much more secure than a spreadsheet. Plus you have to do a lot of extra copying/pasting/window switching with a spreadsheet but just one click for most sites with Passpack, right in your browser. I have over 100 passwords stored! There are competing solutions that are good too. And Passpack is nice enough to allow export of my data if I want to try them out.
Passpack is surely the best option when compared with a plain spreadsheet. Tell me, can you use a spreadsheet for autologin or to share secure information securly(I mean realy security, not a ultra unsecure e-mail or sth. like that)? Surely not. So the question is unnecessary actualy, you SHOULD use Passpack or at least something similar but I do not know anything more secure than Passpack. And yes I’m just a user, not the developer of it, so this is an honest user comment.
Point 2) I dismissed spreadsheet or notepad to keep all my data.. Now I use a passwords manager (passpack.com) and it’s became one of my best friend!
I used to use spreadsheets with Google docs to keep track of logins, notes, etc. Then I got tired of jumping into my spreadsheet to grab login info, etc. and discovered passpack. I have so many logins for memberships, web server logins, etc. that passpack was exactly what I needed.
Seriously, passpack not only secures all my login info. but makes it easier to login to your sites just about anywhere you are. What I really like about passpack is that I can use a different password for every site and use really complex ones and I don’t have to remember them!
Anyway, just my two cents… do not use a spreadsheet. Use something that is secure, makes your life easier to manage and use, and has everything you would need at your fingertips anywhere you have internet.
Spreadsheet for account information? Please don’t do that. A service like PassPack is a much better solution. Not only does it securely store your account info and notes about each site, but it provides one-click login capabilities and it’s free.
You never want to store account information in a simple text file. Also, what happens if you end up on a different computer? Are you going to save your spreadsheet on each computer you use?
Yeah, I’d definitely recommend against using a spreadsheet to manage passwords. Even if you do password protect the spreadsheet, there are one-click utilities out there that can break that password. I’ve been using Passpack for almost a year now and I honestly use it every single day. It’s lightning-quick, has multiple authentication options and can offer one-click logins to your sites. Tara & Co. know their stuff and the site is ridiculously secure… from what I can see and from what I’ve read. If you’d prefer not to go online with your info, I’d recommend an application like KeePass. Both PassPack and KeePass are fast and enable you to find your login information (including usernames, passwords & notes) very quickly.
I, too, am shocked to see that the initial suggestion for keeping track of things is a spread sheet. About the least secure way to do it — and you’re not gaining any efficiency for your compromise in security. An online spreadsheet would alleviate the security issue to a great extent, but even google docs isn’t intuitive/fast enough to really be a great solution for me.
I’m very much in the Passpack camp — probably my most used web based app outside of e-mail. Keep all of your usernames/passwords safely stored where you can find it quickly and easily by search or tags. It has room for your notes on each entry as well. Works great online and there are a couple of options (gears/AIR) for local/desktop access as well. All encryption is done client side, so the server never sees anything but gibberish.
Since becoming a PassPack user, I’ve gradually changed all of my old passwords to generated strings — the only account I can access from memory is Passpack. I’ve never felt more secure with my online accounts. It’s a lot more efficient, in the long run, as well — my login data is not tied to a particular browser or a handful of memorable passwords.
There are a number of web and desktop solutions to handle your passwords (so long as encryption is local, I prefer a remote storage solution for portability) — the important thing is you choose one of those. Not a spreadsheet. The good news is, you can most likely export that spreadsheet as a csv and import it into Passpack. Then destroy that file
RoboForm is also a great resident password manager. (They have a free version with a set number of passwords you can store.) client side with tool bar so you are not keeping your passwords on an others server (encrypted or not). Feature rich and big on security as it is, they also offer the same product you can keep on a USB flash drive so you can keep the passwords off your computer entirely if you choose. And then you can take it with for your laptop or some other computer. Build for multiple users if you and family shared computer or co-workers share publishing duties. It has a generator ~ you set the variables. You can use that same generator for the username where you don’t care about the identity. You can add notes or fields and it’s a form filler/bookmark ~ so you just click the site you want to go to and it logs in for you or right click and fill a field if you’re already on the site. It also has a notes feature which you can choose to protect or leave unprotected ~ great for cut & paste while you work because you can pin always on top ~ with filing system capabilities. oops ~ that was a lot … I don’t work for RoboForm but I’ve been using it for years and can’t live without it.
thanks for guide….nice topic