There is one constant in life that we all share regardless of your occupation or status in life, and that’s time.

Many best practises exist for managing your time, in fact whole companies and applications have grown to help you improve your time management. In business, and especially marketing, time is everything. If you fail to be consistent, or do not deliver on time, the marketing can become ineffective and the business suffers.

Social Media is particularly time intensive, especially Twitter. It can suck you into vortex that makes it a procrastinators hell, becoming a challenge in the real world where we have other pressing demands on our time.

Effective Social Media brings with it fantastic business advantages, it can provide great insight, deeper engagement with your customers and lead to innovation through collaboration.

One of it’s greatest benefits is its ability to help build authority, especially for startups.

So how do you tame time just enough so that you use Twitter more effectively, but avoid the meaningless practise of “total update automation”?

Have A Focus

Knowing what you want to say allows you to have a framework to work with. This framework can make it much easier to maintain focus.

So pick your subject matter carefully, and stick with it.

Research Thoroughly

Once you have decided on your chosen subject or sector, find all the key sources that write, or produce other, quality content on a regular basis. Aggregate these sources into a central repository like Google Reader.

Create a Schedule

These sources will not only provide interesting information for you to share in the social space, but will also allow you to keep up to date with the news and innovation in your sector. Allot a time each day to read through this content as you would your daily paper.

Share the Best

Your job is to select the best stories and most interesting articles to share. By doing this your authority, or your companies, within the sector will grow. Eventually you will become a trusted source for news in your marketplace.

The Automation Bit

It wouldn’t be much use sharing these articles all in one sitting. Your audience wouldn’t appreciate 10 status updates across the span of 20 minutes.

Instead, using a tool called BufferApp you can easily schedule your updates throughout the day.

As you read each article you put the interesting ones into your BufferApp account and these will be Tweeted at pre-programmed intervals.

Monitor and Amend

Now you just need to schedule times within your day to monitor your Twitter account for any feedback, answer any questions and thank those that have Retweeted your updates. You can adjust your update intervals to find the best time to Tweet for your audience, and use the built-in analytics to measure the appeal of your updates.

Over time you may notice patterns around the type of information your audience shares or clicks on, and then you can look for more of this type of content to share.

These 6 steps should provide a foundation upon which you can start to use Social Media more effectively, but if you would like more in-depth information on how to use Social Media you can either sign-up for my online course How to Use Twitter to Build Authority, join my next off-line Social Media course on 4th December 2012 based on the same subject or contact me on 07850957506 for any bespoke training or advice.