Inspired by this post from Amber Naslund (Productivity and Time Wasters in Social Media):

We all want to be more productive and know that where we’re spending our time is worthwhile. I’m asked this question a lot and I see it of others, so I wanted to discuss, in specifics, some of my most productive activities in social media, and some of the biggest time wasters I encounter (and avoid wherever I can).

Naslund goes on to describe her job and how she uses Social Media tools for building and maintaining relationships. Her list of places where time is well spent (I would use the term invested) is very similar to my own (In the post she shares more details of what these things mean, the extras below are my own take):

• My Twitter presence.
• Attending in-person events.
• Responding to email.
• Commenting on blogs.
• Keeping up with LinkedIn.
• Content creation and sharing.
• Reading books.

How I invest my time in Social Media

• Twitter presence. I love Twitter, because I get to talk to people that I know from all over the world about this and that. Many of these folks I met at conferences (see the next bullet) and they have amazing things to say, things that I can learn from every day. You can see my list of people that I follow here (hdbbstephen on Twitter), and you may notice that there are only about 500 of them. I find it difficult to participate in conversations or catch the good information that comes from these folks if I follow many more than that. The good news is that many of these people share awesome links to other Twitter people that I don’t follow, so that the best of the best information still gets through. I also use Twitter for reaching out to new clients and readers for this site, but that is another post!
• Attending in-person events. My favorites are Social Media conferences and Chamber of Commerce events. I love the networking and learning opportunities that come out of them. I am actually planning a pretty cool project involving my local Chamber and some hyper-local news opportunities (stay tuned).
• Reading/Responding to email. This is vital to my business, especially in the website construction and maintenance part, where responsiveness and customer service are part of my differentiation strategy (slow response from website designers is a frequent complaint). Also, I no longer use a RSS feed reader for keeping up with news and other blogs. I only subscribe via e-mail – and these updates are filtered into a special folder in Thunderbird. This way I can catch up on blog reading at my convenience, whether I am online or not.
• Commenting on blogs. This is a fantastic method for reaching out to a larger audience, creating opportunities for guest-posting and larger discussions of topics, and drawing traffic to your own site/community. When you are able to enhance a discussion or provide more information on a topic it shows that you know what you are talking about, an attractive feature for web-surfers. I use this technique in conjunction with reading the e-mails in my “Feed” folder – when I see an interesting post that I can make a contribution to I can click over and leave a comment.
• Keeping up with LinkedIn. I know that I need to be better about this, LinkedIn is such a powerful tool. Unlike other social networking platforms it has very little spam or distracting foolishness. I love to watch how people use the Q&A feature.
• Content creation and sharing. Again, I need to do more writing [those pesky clients are keeping me busy! ], especially about the business development part – a lot of time lately is being invested in my new e-book on Productivity: Today, Tomorrow, or Later. I am also part of the Work.Life.Creativity forum community, which is a lot of fun – creativity is definitely an area in which I want to invest more time.
• Reading books. One of the best investments that you can make is in reading books. Actual books with pages. Yes, really. Oh, I suppose that printing out a PDF of an e-book works too, because I like to take notes while I read, even write in the margins. Reading and learning is, for me, one of the most effective methods – I tend to do a little less well with audio and video content (it may have something to do with my ADD…).

I know that the original post contained time-wasters, but I am not going to dwell on those (I think that we all know what they are for ourselves!) What are some things that you invest your time in for effective, productive work? Leave a comment.