One of the objections to using Social Media tools is that it takes too much time. This means two things; they don’t see the value in building an effective social media profile (they see it as a waste of time) and they don’t have a plan. How often have you thought you’d check twitter or linkedin or facebook for a couple of minutes and found 30 minutes or longer had passed and you don’t feel you’ve accomplished anything.

This method is used to build up your Social Media profile. Adding valuable contacts to your communities requires more than a utility that searches out "business coach" in the bio. Checking each contact builds a community consisting of your ideal client, leaders in your field, joint venture partners and your competition.

Set an alarm for 10 minutes. When the alarm sounds Stop and go back to what you were doing. No exceptions.

Start with one person you’d like to connect with. Sources are:

• business card from face-to-face networking event
• referrals from friends or online contacts
• references in a blog, tweet or LinkedIn/Facebook group
• folks you found in other 10 minute sessions.

1. The first thing you’ll need to do is to create a Twitter list and call it NewFriends or some title that makes sense to you. I’ve set mine to private, but that’s not a clear reason for my decision. Add this list as a column on TweetDeck. This only has to be done once.
2. Follow the person on twitter, then display the people they follow and follow at least 5 people from each list. Look at their twitterID and their last tweet and make the decision to follow them or not. The more you use this system, the less time it will take you to make a decision. Don’t spend too much time, even at first.
3. Add that person to you NewFriends list.
4. If this person is someone you’ve met or was referred to you, search for them on Facebook and LinkedIn and request a connection.
5. With whatever time you have left, examine the list of followers and following and add five people from each, adding them to the NewFollowers list.
6. Check who’s following you now and follow back based on the same criteria above.

Take one day out of your schedule and do housekeeping on your lists. Be ruthless, you’ll build your community faster if you have good quality connections. If they spam, don’t participate, waste everyone’s time, post too often then unconnect with them. This housekeeping can be accomplished in three 10 minute sessions once a week.

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