Recommended Reading This Week

Here are our top picks for what’s buzzing on the web this week….

• List of U.S. retailers on Twitter
  From E-Consultancy: Links to the Twitter pages of U.S. retailers.  This has been added to our Social Media Case Studies Superlist.
• Time Management in the Age of Social Media
  From Business Week: These days I’m asked frequently about the role of social media in personal and organizational productivity. The question is timely, as the major social media applications have millions of users and are still growing fast…..For more on being productive with social media, you can also read our post: How to Boost Your Social Media Productivity.
• The Comprehensive FAQ Guide to Twitter
  From Web Strategy: Here Forrester analyst Jeremiah Owyang responds to commonly asked questions about Twitter.
• Don’t Worry About Being Original, Be Genuinely Useful
  From Adam Singer – The Future Buzz: Stop worrying about creating things that are 100% original. Worrying or wondering about originality in ideas is time wasted, because whether something is completely original or not has no bearing on if something will actually be successful.
• How to Follow ALOT of People on Twitter and Still be Engaging using TweetDeck
  From Darren Rowse on Twitip; One of the most common questions that I’m asked by fellow Twitter users is how I manage the large number of people that I follow and am followed by on Twitter. One of the tools that has helped me incredibly to manage the task is TweetDeck.
• Social Networking Is Not Just a Numbers Game
  From Debbie Weil: Solid advice on improving the quality of your connections and interactions not the quantity! For more on building an effective social network, see our post: Ultimate How to Grow Your Social Network.
• The Consequences of Social Media Silence
  From Convince and Convert: In a recent post, social media consultant Jason Baer explores the risks companies take in refusing to participate in social media. For a related article see our post: How to Sell Social Media to Cynics, Skeptics and Luddites.
• A Poor Man’s Guide to Finding Influencers
  From The Buzz Bin: Good article from Mike Nelson on how to identify and engage top influentials within your community of interest online. It starts with finding the right keywords. For more on growing your social media network see our post Ultimate How To Grow Your Social Media Network.
• Turning MySpace into Mom’s space
  From iMedia Conenction: They’re powerful, outspoken, and know how to band together to make brands sit up and take notice of their needs. And they’re joining social networks in droves. Find out how and why you should seek the approval of moms for your next campaign.
• How To Deal With Negative Comments About You On Twitter
  From Corporate Dollar: Solid advice on how to deal with negative comments others make about you or your organization on Twitter.
• The top 7 mistakes New Twitter users make
  From 10,000 Words: From not completing a bio to protecting updates (and then complaining about no followers), this post rundowns top blunders Twitter newbies will want to avoid. For more see our Superlist of What Not To Do In Social Media
• Finding the Right “Brand Voice” on Twitter
  From Mashable: When businesses open an account on Twitter, they must consider the right “Brand Voice.” One that is appropriate for what they want to say, and who they want to reach.

Want to use social media more productively?  Worried that Social Media is taking up too much of your time?

This concern is common when it comes to Social Media and one we addressed in our recent post: How to Sell Social Media To Cynics, Skeptics and Luddites.

It’s a reasonable concern. Social media can take a lot of time.  But there are tools and techniques that can help you be more efficient in your social media activities.

In this post, we’ve put together a  comprehensive list of articles with great advice, tips and tools to help you be more productive and efficient when using social media.  We also have some posts that offer up general online productivity insights.

Have any tips of your own?   Please feel free to comment and share what works for you.

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• HOW TO: Simplify Your Social Media Routine (NEW)
  
  From Mashable: Leo Babauta of Zen Habits provides 6 steps for streamlining your social media routine so you can continue to participate in the conversation, without losing sight of your mission and the important work you need to get done – from using simple tools to focusing on sending out high impact messages and more.
• Simple Efficiency Tweaks to Get More Done in Social Media
  From Social Media Explorer: Advice on a few simple, fast efficiency tweaks that can help you get more done in social media.
• How Much Time Does Web 2.0 Take?
  From Museum 2.0: Interesting article that offers a rundown of the real time costs of a variety of social media endeavors.
• How Batch Processing Made Me 10 Times More Productive
  From Problogger: Blogging expert Darren Rowse shares his technique, one he calls ‘batch processing‘, that has increased his productivity incredibly.
• How To Build A Social Media Cockpit With Firefox
  From Corporate Dollar: Excellent post on setting up the Firefox browser to signficantly enhance your social media productivity.
• Use Social Media Efficiently- 52 Tips
  
  From Beth Kanter:  52 ideas to help make your organization’s social media strategy and use more effective and efficient
• Ten Tech Solutions To Improve Your Productivity
  From Chris Brogan: Solid tips on tech solutions to manage your social media life.
• How to Downsize Your Social Network Portfolio
  From CNET: Advice on slimming down the number of social media services you participate in so you can spend quality time on the ones you keep.
• Managing the time you spend daily on social media sites
  From Mike Smith: How to find ways to better manage the time you’re spending on social media sites.
• Social Media for the Time-Starved: How to Get Started
  From The Social Path: Four simple steps that will make you feel socially savvy without making your life even more hectic:
• How to Use Twitter Without Twitter Owning You – 5 Tips
  From Tim Ferriss: Advice from the author of the 4-Hour Workweek on how to be the master of your Twitter use and not the slave of it.
• More Efficient RSS Reading
  From Web Worker Daily: The harsh reality is that there are only so many hours in the day one can spend reading and learning. Here are some tips for using your RSS reader more productively.
• How to be More Productive
  From The Blog Herald: Five easy steps to getting yourself organized online from Organizing your Delicious bookmarks to unsubscribing from unnecessary emails.
• How to Track 500 Business Blogs in 10 Minutes a Day
  From Mashable: Listening is an important part of developing your social media strategy. This helpful post by Aaron Uhrmacher (my fellow alum from NYU’s Interactive Telecom Grad program) – a simple guide to maximize the number of conversations that you can listen to using the smallest amount of company time.
• HOW TO: Manage Multiple Social Media Profiles
  From Mashable: Ben Parr offers up 5 steps that make the task of maintaining multiple profiles less tedious, freeing up time to better connect with other people.
• A Quick ‘n Dirty Guide to Setting up Social Media Monitoring
  From Social Media Explorer: A quick and dirty guide to setting up basic social media monitoring using free tools and only a half hour or less per day.
• Improve Your Twitter Efficiency
  From Web Worker Daily: How to make your use of Twitter more efficient: spend less time using it, while still getting the information you need.
• Twitter: Productivity Tool or Time Waster?
  From Web Worker Daily: Article includes list of ten ways that Twitter can be harnessed as a productivity tool.
• HOW TO: Live Inside Twitter and Still Stay Productive
  From Mashable: 10 useful things you can accomplish with Twitter while you’re living inside of it.
• How To Avoid The Social Media Time Suck
  From Corporate Dollar: Even incremental time management improvements with your social media efforts can add up to huge gains in long-term productivity – without the wasted time. Here are a few ways to manage your time with social media.
• Social Media: Get Productive with Social Media (and Stay Sane)
  From Lifehacker: Three simple steps for engaging in social media more productively – and for keeping your sanity too!
• The 20 Biggest Online Time Wasters, and 6 Strategies for Beating Them
  From Dumb Little Man: Discussion of common online and social media activities that can waste your time and strategies for using them effectively and without wasting time.
• The 10-Minute Daily Guide to Building Your Social Media Profile
  From Instigator Blog: Tips for maintaining and raising your social media profile as efficiently and effectively as possible – in 10 minutes a day.
• Does The Way You Twitter Cause You Stress?
  From Twitip: Advice on using twitter without getting stressed out.
• KeepMeOut: Stop Email or Facebook Addiction
  From Make Use Of: If you have an email or facebook addiction and find yourself checking them too often instead of doing what you’re supposed to do. Try Keep Me Out. It’s an online application that can help you overcome your addiction of visiting certain websites (Gmail, Facebook, Digg, Myspace, etc.) too frequently. It starts sending you warning alerts when you visit such sites too often.  Too Big Brother?
  
• Creating Social Media Rituals
  From Social Media Explorer: Good advice for those new to social media and those who find the time commitment for social media overwhelming — suggested rituals to help make things easier.
• 10 Simple Productivity Tips for Bloggers
  From Daily Blog Tips: Concrete list of tips to help bloggers manage their blogging activities in a more efficient way.
• How to Shorten URLs and Track Clicks
  From Wild Apricot Blog: URL Shortening is an essential tool in social media especially for Twitter. Here’s a review of URL shortening in general and a look at a few of the most useful (and often time saving) features that you’ll want to look when choosing a short-URL service.
• How to Organize Your Web With Delicious – The Essential Toolbox
  From Makeuseof.com: Discussion of a set of tools that can help you be more productive by making the most of Delicious bookmarks.
• 5 Wi-Fi Hotspot Finders To Find Free Wi-Fi Spots Near You
  From MakeUseOf.com: To make your life a little easier, and to avoid you being that guy, here are five methods to help you find free Wi-Fi spots near you. Whether they’re restaurants, airports, Apple stores (always a good bet), or friendly store owners, there’s sure to be free Wi-Fi near you.
• 7 Productivity Tips, Plus Tools for Freelancers and Web Workers
  From Mashable: Tips, tools and methods to make your productive.
• Top 10 Email Productivity Boosters
  From Lifehacker: List of 10 top ways to enhance your efficiency with email.
• Inbox Taming for Busy People
  From Chris Brogan: Chris shares his own process for managing what I suspect is a very busy email inbox.
• 7 Ways to Own Social Media Before it Owns You
  From Collective Thoughts: Instead of suffering from social media overload, consider these tips to manage your efforts.
• Scaling Yourself
  From Chris Brogan: Great advice from a social media thought-leader on how to find and make time, prioritize, and cut back to boost your productivity.
• Slow Feed Movement: 7 Tools to Filter the RSS Flood
  From Mashable: Tools that can help you make sense of the flood of information coming via your RSS feeds and help you filter out the junk.
• How To Grow Your Business With Social Media And Not Have It Take Over Your Day
  From Mixergy: Interview with social media specialist Chris Winfield on easier techniques for using social media.
• Five tips for using social media productively
  From MarkTzk.com: While using social media takes up time, you can use social media and still be productive. Tips on how to do this.
• Social Media Productivity: “Submit It & Forget It”
  From Social Media Rockstar: How giving up this one dirty social media habit that eats up too much time and rarely produces anything in return can make you more productive
• There’s No Reason To Feel Overwhelmed
  From The Future Buzz: An admonition that you are in control of you utilize social media and how you should control social media rather than let it control you.
• Business Twitter Tools and Ideas- optimize your workflow and thoughts.
  From 123 Social Media: Five steps for making your social media process more efficient.
• HOW TO: Quiet the Twitter Noise
  From Mashable: As the number of people you follow on Twitter grows, so does the volume of tweets you get in your Twitter Stream. Here’s some advice on how to manage this most productively.
• Tweetwasters – Wastin’ Time Tweetin’
  Want to find out how much time you (or someone else) wastes on Twitter. Enter in a Twitter username and the site provides details on time spent using twitter.
• HOW TO: Save Time With Website Registration and Profiles
  From Mashable: Here are some simple steps that you can use to smooth the form-filling process, and each subsequent time you sign up for a site, think of the following as a handy checklist that ensures you’ve got everything ready
• How to Downsize Your Social Network Portfolio
  From CNET: Advice on cleaning out our social network portfolio and start using only those services that you like best in each category since spending more time on multiple services isn’t nearly as rewarding as getting more quality time with the best services.
• Manage Your Messages on Dozens of Social Networking Services at Once with Ping.fm
  From Twitip: Reviews Ping.fm, a very helpful tool that can be used to manage Twitter and other social media accounts more effectively.
• Managing Social Media with a System
  From Duct Tape Marketing: Participating fully in social media as a business and marketing strategy requires discipline, automation routines and a daily commitment. Here’s systematic approach to using social media most effectively.
• 10 Tools to Make Your Blog Smarter, Faster, Better
  From Fast Company: Rundown of tools that help speed up and streamline blogging.
• How to Get Things Done with Twitter | Zen Habits
  From Zen Habits: Advise on accomplishing specific task using Twitter from following up with someone using a direct message to sending yourself a reminder.
• GTD Toolbox: 100+ Resources for Getting Things Done
  From Mashable: Getting Things Done, also abbreviated as GTD, is a popular time management productivity method created by David Allen. The method is just as popular today as it was back in 2007 when we ran our GTD Ninja post featuring more than 50 apps to help you be more productive and organized. But there are a host of new applications out there to help you be even more productive this year. Below are more than 100 of them – many that can help you manage your social media efforts.
• How To Use An Online Stopwatch To Increase Productivity
  From Make Use Of: Advice on using an online stopwatch to prevent you from wasting your time when online.
• Top 30 iPhone Apps for Organization and Productivity
  From Mashable: With these 30 apps you can create to do lists, invoice for contract work, access your computer remotely, manage all your online accounts in one place, print files to your phone, and more — these handy apps can make your more productive when you’re on the go.
• How to Start Using Greasemonkey in Under 5 Minutes
  From Read Write Web: Greasemonkey is a powerful Firefox add-on that lets you change the appearance and functionality of almost any page on the web. Once you download Greasemonkey you can download a range of related userscripts that can help you save time when using various social media services like Delicious and Twitter. Here’s a I4-minute screencast showing you how to use the program and some things you may want to do with it.
• How to Save Time Commenting on Blogs
  From Life Rocks: If you spend time commenting on blogs you read, a time-consuming part is filling the name, email and website link on each blog.  You can automate the commenting section of blogs with two tools which will save time and also help you fill more comments.
• How to Become a Super Tweeter in Just 15 Minutes a Day with iGoogle
  From Micro Persuasion: Tips on using iGoogle to discover content that other people don’t have time to find so you can Tweet it to them. Using iGoogle right will let you do this quickly and efficiently.
• How to Monitor Your Social Media Presence in 10 Minutes a Day
  From Hubspot: Five easy steps to monitor your social media more efficiently and in less time.
• 3 Firefox Add-Ons To Help You Blog More Easily
  From Make Use Of: Review of 3 Firefox add-ons that will empower you with quick and easy ways to blog.
• 8 Tips To Make FireFox Search Friendly
  From Make Use Of: How often do you search the web? A lot probably. Here are tips to help Firefox users optimize their search experience and help you save time.
• Syndicating Content and Social Bookmarking
  From 123 Social Media: Sharing your content via social bookmarking and social sites is a critical component to driving traffic. Rather than submit to each site individually, you can submit your information across dozens of portals with ease with one of these four social bookmarking tools.
• HOW TO: Make Firefox Your Productivity Machine
  From Mashable: Nice summary of ways that the Firefox browser can help you be more productive.
• 5 Speedy Tips For Faster Browsing In Firefox
  From Make Use Of: Here are 5 excellent tips to make browsing even smoother and faster on Firefox.
• How to Manage Your Social Profiles and Create Virtual Business Cards
  From Mashable: Review of tools that you can use to manage and share your profiles online more effectively.
• Gmail Craze: 40 + Tools and Hacks for Gmail
  From Make Use Of: Tools that will help you take your Gmail productivity to another level entirely.
• Lifehacker Top 10: Top 10 Tools to Get Blogging Done
  From Lifehacker: Round up of tools and tricks that make blog posts go faster and smoother.
• 100+ More Ways to Organize Your Life
  From Mashable: From basic to do lists to event planning, fitness, educational organizers, and more, here are 100 new applications to get you even more organized.
• 5 Gmail Labs Features Worth Enabling
  From Make Use Of: Here are five Gmail Labs apps (or you can call them features) that, once enabled, make Gmail an even better application for all your emailing needs.
• Make Your Own FireFox Search Plugins & Other Tips
  From Make Use Of: Search plugins options in FireFox are useful for one simple reason: you can store all your search engines in one place and quickly access any of them any time. They save space and time. What’s more, the search plugins option can be configured in multiple ways and few people are really aware of how much fun they can have with this functionality. Here are some tips and tricks to show how you can customize your FireFox search plugins. Plus few links to make your own firefox search plugin.
• Increase Productivity with Gmail Multiple Inboxes
  From WebWorkerDaily: Discussion of how Google’s Multiple Inboxes Lab, which works for both @gmail.com and Google Apps addresses can help you be more productive. This lets you sub-divide your inbox into multiple views.
• 17 Firefox Extensions That Make Blogging Easy – Stepcase Lifehack
  From Stepcase Lifehack: Rundown on Firefox extensions that can help bloggers be more efficient.
• How to: Start Using Greasemonkey in Under 5 Minutes
  From Read Write Web: Greasemonkey Greasemonkey is a powerful Firefox add-on that lets you change the appearance and functionality of almost any page on the web. Once you download Greasemonkey, you can add userscripts that can help make your use of social media tools more effective and efficient. Here’s a good tutorial on how to use this power tool.
• Top 10 Greasemonkey scripts to improve your productivity
  From Stepcase Lifehack: How you can use Greasemonkey and Greasemonkey userscripts to be more productive.
• Investing too much time on Social Media? How to boost your ROI
  From Sales Intelligence Blog by InsideView: Tips for sales professionals on how to get the most out of social media without it taking up too much of their time.