Twitter & Social Media, What A Waste Of Time.

May 14, 2010 - PRLog -- Now why would I write a post about how to waste time and also why would I say that about one of my greatest marketing efforts?

Well the reason I say it is because I see this with other internet marketers all the time, they are wasting potentially hours and hours of their time within Twitter, when they could have been very productive making social media work for them.

Now the ways I see people wasting there time on twitter are,

1, Respond to every direct message, yes even the ones that say, Hey Marc, you might like this service, it lets your Facebook friends find you on Twitter...link.com. (how many times have you seen that message)

2, Use Twitter like watching the end credits of a movie, you know what I mean, when the credits roll.

3, Follow to many people.

These 3 time wasting ways nearly get the best of us and at one point got me.

So what are the solutions to these?

1, Now I am not saying not to respond to any of your direct messages that would be silly, I tend to only reply to those people who have bothered to look at my profile and mentioned something that only a real person would have noticed about me. Yes I do use SocialOomph which kicks out a auto DM to all my new followers, but at the same time I always send at least 10 real direct messages a day from me to start and engage with some of my new followers.

2, When it comes to sitting in front of your Twitter page reading through all the tweets, then refreshing the page to look at a load more tweets, then suddenly before you know it, you realise that you have been sitting there for 2 hours being in the Twitter trance. So how do you shake yourself out of the trance. Now remember, I love Twitter, and I strongly suggest that if you are in internet marketing, then that's what you should only use Twitter for. It's that simple, you wouldn't spend all day in a McDonald's after you have just eaten a big mac would you? So set yourself a time to market on Twitter, then leave.

3, O.K. now you might be saying, "practise what you preach Marc" But if you are new to marketing on Twitter, or you have not been doing it for that long, then if you have a lot of followers you will sure to get lost. Having lot's of followers is usually a good thing, and I always encourage other skilled internet marketers to do the same. But what I am trying to say is, get used to Twitter first, know how it works with lists, and how you can target people, then once you are having results then I would say go for a stronger following.

So please do not waste time using Twitter, if you are a internet marketer then Twitter is a tool to help you in your journey and should never hold you back in wasting your time when you could be marketing your time elsewhere.

Hope these tips have helped, and would love your feedback.

To Your Success

Marc Ward
'The Art Of Social Media Marketing'
http://www.marcjward.com