Two of the biggest obstacles to succeeding (and by succeeding I mean, being consistently active) in social media are:
1) Feeling that you don’t have enough time to dedicate to it
2) Feeling that you waste a lot of time while ‘doing’ social media – getting distracted, clicking a bunch of links etc.
How many times have you sat down to spend the 15 minutes you’ve so carefully carved out of your day to spend on Twitter, and then looked at the clock to find that 30 have passed and what have you been doing? Clicking all sorts of links and getting sucked down the rabbit hole of the interweb.
What if you could turn that guilty pleasure into productive social media time?
Well there is an extremely simple way to do that. By using the available browser extensions for various social sites, you can ‘do’ your social media while browsing the web. Tweet out great articles, bookmark them on Delicious, and work that StumbleUpon account, all at the same time.
Here’s a few of my personal favorite tools and add-ons to use. I’m a Firefox/Chrome user so this list reflects that bias (sorry IE users).
Twitter – The Hootlet is a little tool that sits in the bookmark bar of your browser. Whenever you come across an article you want to Tweet out you just click the Hootlet and a wee Hootsuite window opens up, populated with the title and link of the page you’re viewing, ready for Tweeting. You do have to have a Hootsuite account, which you won’t regret setting up since it’s one of the best Twitter applications available.
Delicious – Bookmark sites with a couple of clicks as you browse. Chrome recently added an extension for this but it’s a little buggy, so you may want to stick to using the bookmarklet until they’ve ironed out the kinks.
StumbleUpon – The SU toolbar makes it easy to review and give the thumbs up to sites as you browse. It’s important to review sites that are not your own in order to develop an effective SU profile, rather than simply submitting your own pages. So using their toolbar makes it much easier to build your profile with minimal time investment.
Friendfeed – Post articles to your FriendFeed account directly from your browser with the bookmarklet.
Digg – Digg provide a few goodies such as toolbars and bookmarklets so that you can Digg & submit stories as you surf.
WordPress – You’ll find their handy “Press This” bookmarklet in the Tools section of your WordPress backend. It allows you to “clip text, images and videos from any web page. Then edit and add more straight from Press This before you save or publish it in a post on your blog.” Very handy if you come across a blog post you’d like to reference and it inspires a post of you own.
Shareaholic – This is a really nifty tool which works with a very large selection of social sites. You can customize it to select only the services you are interested in, making it a possible onestop shop for sharing and meaning you need only have one button on your browser toolbar which gives you the ability to post to the sites of your choosing.
Of course, there’s more to social media than just sharing great links, but if you can get in the habit of using these tools, you’ll find it much easier to maintain some type of active presence on a variety of sites.
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