Social media as it is being used today for personal and professional goals can be an excellent creativity booster and an awesome  networking medium.

It hurts productivity when you let your time spent on social media trickle in to your time allocated to ‘work’ to achieve your goals – and this entirely is dependent on what your goal is to be engaged in social media conversations in the first place.

How you use social media depends entirely on you – your time management skills, your knowledge of tools that make social media interaction more “time-bound” and effective, your skills to network and help promote others and of course your personal motivation to engage audience and present value to them.

However with many positive aspects it can also get out of control very easily if you do not know how to harness its strength towards productivity and to increase creativity at your present work. In a recent #careerchat (Twitter chat on career related issues) some valuable insights were shared by career experts on this topic. Here’s an excerpt:

Social media offers you the wonderful opportunity to network with influential people around the world. The right interaction can spark creative ideas & productive results –what’s important is to know how you can plan a meaningful interaction and add value to your conversations. To use social media creatively you must have a plan on what exactly you want to achieve and how. You can get many creative ideas finding out about new startups and products through Twitter – an inspiration too. Social media enhances my productivity through more involvement with my competition.

Time management is utmost important when you know that you could be on chat, or reading articles for hours during your most productive hours. Know that you must not encroach on your work time to chat, there has to be a limit – consider such activities after work or during lunch hour. Some scheduling tools help you use social media creatively are: Hootsuite, Tweetdeck, RavenTools.

In a very informative post on ProBlogger, Leo Widrich of Buffer enlightens us on 9 New Productivity Tools to Simplify Your Online Life. Recommended readng on this topic, good info here.

If you use social media during your work hours it must focus completely on bringing value to your company or project and you must inform your supervisor about any such activity. Unless of course you are the social media manager for your company all your time can be devoted on the various channels.

For a marketing or sales job, getting to know the latest news from competitors is very important and perhaps some hours interacting with customers and organizations adds value to your job.

@Careerbright

 

Good organization skills are the key for productivity. Creativity tends to get sparked along the way

@bbenishek

 

Social media, like anything else, can be a distraction or a very useful tool. You get to choose how to use it!

@kbaumann

 

Working from home, social media is my office/water cooler/club. Very important to staying connected with work and world

@careertips

 

By ignoring social media you run the risk of someone else representing you. A presence is necessary.

@GlocapAssistant

 

By following thought-leaders, individuals have access to current information within their field of study.

@WLCAdultGrad

 

What’s your take on this topic?