Social media can take up much more time than you want it to; much more time than you have to spend.

If you have a social media strategy, then you will have more time to spend on other aspects of your business.

If you already have a successful business, chances are that you are pretty good at planning. Social media can be a time consuming part of your business. You don’t want it to suck the life out of you and your business. How can you avoid this?

Use the Social Media tools that are available to you!

• Try having one person in your company in charge of social media -This person can concentrate only on this aspect of your business. When one person is in charge of too many items, chances are that things will not get done with the accuracy that they should. I’ve learned this the hard way!
• Create a schedule that you can stick to – There are lots of tools out there to help you do this. Try researching some of them and see which ones would be the best fit for your business.
• Use Google Trends, Google Alerts and Google Reader to identify other blogs you can follow and curate their posts.

How are you keeping your business from spending too much time on social media marketing? Let us know what tricks work for you in the comments below.