Social media perhaps is so popular due to its intrinsic ability to allow people to waste time effectively. Merely logging into a social media network will put in front of users plenty of relevant and interesting content that allows them to spend hours surfing, learning and enjoying themselves. As such, it can be all too easy to fall into the trap if you are a social media manager. With this temptation and countless others, jobs that should take minutes can wind up taking much longer, making it more difficult to tackle all of the other challenges in your day-to-day life. In order to help social media managers make the most of their time, we’ve put together this article with a few short and sweet solutions for saving time when work needs to get done on Facebook, Twitter, and beyond.

Block Out the Noise

Spare and open tabs. Extra apps. Television. All of these elements can be huge distractions to anyone trying to get some work done. The best way to handle these situations and distractions is to eliminate them entirely. Most social media managers have a regular routine that requires a set amount of work each day. It is easy to tell yourself that these distractions can be enjoyed later, but not now. Even the smallest interest that is indulged while trying to get work done on Facebook, Twitter and beyond will result in you inevitably pinging search engines for answers to questions, watching videos on Facebook and otherwise wasting time. Cut these distractions out and vow not to engage in your fleeting interests while working!

Determine Peak Efficiency

Day-to-day social media work can be tedious, but it can be downright terrifying if you try to do it during times of the day that you are not hard-wired to work properly. Everybody has a peak time at which they can work most effectively; fighting against it will only result in less productive and less enthusiastic work. Each person can naturally determine when he or she is prime for getting things done on social media, but this must in many cases also coincide at least in part with the habits of those on your social media network. If your audience is engaging with you during one time but you are ignoring them for hours, then the results you get may be less than phenomenal.

Investigate Social Media Tools

There are many different social media tools available to social media managers that can help squeeze more efficiency out of the process. From built-in utilities like Facebook scheduling (allows users to line up posts in advance to be deployed when necessary) to external tools such as scoop.it and Feedly, there is so much that social media managers can utilize in order to find new content, improve their existing offerings and save crucial minutes here and there. Combined with internal or external analytics, these utilities can make for a formidable team of efficient social media that surpasses any research acquired by pinging search engines or scouring the web manually.