by The Ibis Network

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Whether you’re managing the Chicago Cubs or your local Radio Shack, you’re going to need some organizational skills. Organization is the key to reducing the stress – and amount of work – necessary to manage whatever it is you’re overseeing. And that goes for your social-media accounts too. It’s easy to become overwhelmed with maintaining all the email addresses, Facebook pages, blogs, and assorted Internet properties you’ve setup for your business. Hell, it’s hard enough to remember your passwords without worrying about updating your sites regularly, maintaining a professional presentation, and responding to comments and questions that come in from your friends, fans, and followers. The good news is there’s a better way.

Here are a few tips to help organize your social-media accounts …

Centralize to Minimize: Start by creating a separate email address for your entire social network. Having one email address reserved for your online efforts means, rather than logging in and out of multiple pages and accounts, you receive all of your comments and contacts in one place. It also means you won’t have to remember to update your sites if you change jobs or email providers. Keeping your contacts connected to a single account will reduce the amount of time and effort it takes to keep up with your pages and profiles, if only because it’ll reduce the need for remembering which of your email accounts you used to set up your Twitter page and which you used to set up your blog.

Be Nice: Okay, now that you’ve got all of your correspondence in one easy-to-locate location, you’ll have no excuse for not responding to any messages or comments you receive. That’s right. Just like in the real world, Internet communication requires you to be responsive and polite. It may seem like a lot of work to scroll through your inbox and respond to any questions or criticisms you find along the way but a timely response shows visitors that you haven’t abandoned your site and also helps create a sense of community, availability, and professionalism. After all, if social-media is about communication than communicating has to be the key to a successful social-media marketing campaign.

Work Smart, Work Less: For one, you don’t have to create unique content for each of your sites. Share your updates, link your pages, and syndicate your output. There are more and more opportunities and applications aimed at helping you share your messages across your entire social network. Reduce your workload by sharing content and updates between sites. It may boost traffic from one site to another and it’ll certainly reduce the stress that follows feeling like you’ve got to come up with a tweet, a Facebook update, and a blog post every few minutes.

The Ibis Network / www.theibisnetwork.com