FastCompany.com writes: When you're active on the Web, keeping up with all your online accounts
can feel like a full-time job. You want your high school friends to
find you on Facebook, your co-workers to follow you on Twitter, and
business associates to find you on LinkedIn. But there are only so many
hours in the day, and too many Web sites to check in and update. The
good news is that you don't have to hire a personal assistant to update
all your profiles. With the right strategy, you can manage multiple
accounts with minimal effort. Here's how.
First, make social network activity come to you. Pick your primary
channel of communication and route all your notifications from various
services to come through it. I call this funneling. For example, you
check your email every day. Most every service can send you email
alerts when you receive a message or get a new follower or comment. You
can funnel Facebook messages, Flickr photo comments, Twitter direct
messages, and LinkedIn questions all to your email inbox. (Don't
forget: if email alerts come too often, change your settings to reduce
the volume. On LinkedIn, for example, you can get a weekly digest email
instead of instantaneous alerts every time.)
Second, interact with multiple services from a single interface. If
some of your friends use Facebook and others use Twitter and others
update their own blog, keep up with all those news streams in a single
place like your RSS reader, or a tool like TweetDeck or FriendFeed. You
can maximize your time even more and broadcast updates to multiple
services in one shot. From TweetDeck or Digsby, for example, you can
post a status update to both Twitter and Facebook at the same time.
Finally, split up your social media accounts for personal and
business purposes. You don't want your boss to see that you're tweeting
from the beach on a sick day, and you don't want your Mom to read about
the hot date you had last night. Designate different accounts for
different purposes and configure your privacy settings accordingly.
While you don't want your social life to feel like work, keeping up a
presence online and doing it well can pay off in business contacts and
job leads down the road.
