Technology is available that can help you manage your social-media accounts effectively and save you time, says Shauna Trainor, marketing manager with the Covenant Group in Toronto.

Social-media platforms offer excellent ways to interact with members of your target market. But if you’re not careful, the time you spend on these sites can reduce your productivity. Trainor provides three ways to use social-media technology to help you stay on track:

> Use dashboards to schedule your posts
Dashboard apps, such as TweetDeck and HootSuite, are great for programming your posts in advance. Take 15 minutes or half an hour to compose the messages you plan on posting on your social-media platforms, and schedule them to be sent out throughout the day.

For those who love Twitter, TweetDeck is a free and easy to use. HootSuite, on the other hand, is the best bet for connecting with multiple social-media accounts. Hootsuite is free of charge if you use up to five accounts, which can include Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Twitter and WordPress.

Dashboards help you share similar content across multiple sites at various times. For example, suppose you just wrote an article on budgeting for your blog. You can have your dashboard share it immediately through your Twitter and Facebook accounts, but schedule it for the next morning on LinkedIn.

Be sure to verify your firm’s social media policy regarding the use of dashboards. It may be difficult to schedule many posts in advance if your compliance department states that all social media activity must be approved first.

> Manage the updates you receive
Whether you’re using a dashboard or are posting directly on your social-media accounts, the incoming messages you receive from your connections can bog you down, too. There are ways to control the quantity and the quality of the posts you receive.

For example, on Facebook, you can choose to “hide” status updates. This way you can stay connected to these individuals without being forced to view their posts about what they had for lunch or when they went to the gym.

Twitter allows you to group your followers into lists and then view tweets from only those individuals. So, if you want to focus on what your centres of influence are saying, you can group them into a list and avoid reading tweets from others.

LinkedIn provides a menu that lets you narrow your newsfeed by individual connection or group, or other criteria.

> Sign up for notifications
Being effective means not only spending less time browsing your social-media accounts; it is also about knowing when to check in. One of those “right” times is soon after someone has mentioned you on Twitter or added a comment to your LinkedIn group discussion page.

“It’s a unique opportunity to engage with others,” Trainor says, “and potentially take your thought leadership to a new level.”

Ensure you are signed up to receive notice when someone interacts with you on social media. Notifications are often sent to an email address. They can be sent to your phone if you have downloaded your social-media smartphone apps.

When someone mentions you, Trainor says, try to engage with that person. Send a response or a simple “thank you” within 24 hours.

This is the second instalment in a two-part series on improving your effectiveness on social media.