Twitter time management

I’ve fielded the question/complaint several times in recent weeks: How do I find time to Twitter?

At one level, the answer is simple: You make time for what’s important and Twitter is an important skill for journalists to master. Figure it out.

But I also understand the question and complaint. Twitter can easily suck up big chunks — or lots of little chunks — of your day if you let it. And busy journalists facing too many demands in shrunken newsrooms can’t afford to let anything steal away too much of their day. So in some January Twitter workshops in Ottawa and again in blog posts challenging the Associated Press Managing Editors to engage more on Twitter, I promised to provide some Twitter time-management tips.

The tips specific to Twitter are coming shortly. But first a caveat: You need to invest some time learning to use Twitter and connecting with followers, primarily people in your community and colleagues who share your professional interests. And also a suggestion for APME members: You spend too much time in meetings. Cut your meetings shorter and use some of the time you save mastering Twitter (and tell the overworked staff members who spend too much time in those meetings with you to do the same).

Now for the tips on Twitter time management:

Don’t drink the whole stream. When you start on Twitter, following a few dozen people, it’s pretty easy to read all their tweets and it’s natural to think that you’re supposed to. Then, as you engage on Twitter, you start following more people and it gets harder to read anything they say.

I like to think of Twitter as a beautiful, clear mountain stream. I can enjoy it lots of different ways: Sit on the bank and watch it rush by; wade in for some fly fishing (my fly-fishing son will laugh if he reads this, because I don’t fish); get a cool drink from the clear water (we’re not talking an Iowa river here, polluted by farm water); paddle a canoe; take off my shoes and feel the cool water rush across my bare feet. But I don’t have to spend my whole day in the stream. I don’t have to drink every drop or catch every fish (in truth, I’ve never caught a fish, but I do like this metaphor, so I’m pretending). I might hike some trails. I’ll need to cook dinner. I want to watch the sunset. The stream is only part of how I enjoy the mountains.

Same with Twitter. I can get benefit out of Twitter in just a few minutes a day. Some days I will want to spend more time with Twitter. Some days Twitter will provide great value and be worth spending some time. I don’t have to use Twitter just one way. The next tips will help you get quick use of Twitter, but an important part of the challenge is simply understanding that you can engage briefly without spending the whole day in a canoe.

Integrate Twitter into your day. We all have things we do as part of our routine that don’t require scheduling but take only a few minutes here and there: checking voice mail, returning phone calls, checking email, checking the wires. Make Twitter one of those things you do a few minutes here, a minute there. It will become a more productive and more valuable part of your day than most of those chores I already listed. Emily Muhlbach uses Twuffer to schedule her tweets, so they post through the day, even if she does them all in one burst.

Tweet a few times each day. Twitter is not a spectator sport. As I explained in my recent response to Carole Tarrant of the Roanoke Times and the APME board, you can tweet in just a few minutes a day. Your tweets don’t have to take much time, but they help you engage with colleagues and your community. At least to start, find a good time each day to post a few tweets: First thing in the morning, after lunch, after the morning news meeting.

Check your “mentions.” The Twitter home page and most Twitter clients give you a place to check all tweets mentioning you (@stevebuttry, in my case), whether replying to you, talking about you or retweeting you. Just click that a few times a day. If someone has replied to you or mentioned you, you can answer in just a few minutes.

Search your real name. I have a saved Twitter search for “Steve Buttry,” because not everyone uses @stevebuttry. Using this search and the mentions, I can engage any time someone is talking to me or about me, without constantly watching the whole stream rush by or trying to catch up on what I’ve missed.

Use Twitter as a news source. I loved that one of the reasons Carole gave me that top newsroom leaders are too busy for Twitter is that they have to read so many blogs and stories about our industry. Twitter is a wonderful tool for keeping up on the industry. Follow the right people and you’ll read a better selection of blogs than you are now and you’ll find them more efficiently. Learn to use Twitter effectively and you’ll save time on professional reading. I don’t even use an RSS reader any more because Twitter is so much better. I go whole weeks without reading Romenesko (once a must-read for any news leader), because Twitter brings me the lots of important industry reading before I would read it on Romenesko as well as pieces that never make Romenesko. You remember that famous nameless college student who told the New York Times the important news would find her? Twitter is how the important industry news and commentary finds me.

Use your cell phone. Use a Twitter app such as Tweetie (that’s what I use on my iPhone) to make Twitter easier to use on your phone. You can browse some tweets or fire off a quick tweet while walking to or from your car, while waiting for a meeting to start or riding an elevator. “Tweet during uploads/MULTITASK,” advised Andrea Sirman of the Ottawa Citizen, when I asked my tweeps for advice on Twitter time management.

Use Twitter Tim.es. This is a great tool for catching up when you’ve been away from the stream and using Twitter to help the important news find you. After you connect with some people in the business and in your community, go to twittertim.es and sign in using Twitter. It will present the links your tweeps (or you can customize based just on your media sources or Twitter lists — more on them shortly) are citing most. For instance, right now, my Twitter Tim.es highlights a really atrocious lead (likening a football game to 9/11, though I’m a little puzzled how a September story went viral in February) that 10 of my tweeps have highlighted, a TechCrunch payola apology and a TechCrunch post about the Facebook redesign. You don’t have to scroll through your tweets to find the links your tweeps are talking about. Twitter Tim.es does that for you. If you are tied up all day and want to catch up quickly on the Twitter conversation without scrolling through hundreds of tweets, this is a great tool.

Use Twitter lists. Twitter lets you sort the people you follow. I like the general Twitter stream, where everyone’s tweets come together in chronological order, most recent on top. I scroll through some lively, important or silly conversations going on in the community or the industry, click on links my tweeps have found interesting and laugh at the latest posts of FakeAPStylebook or OHNewsroom. That’s the time-consuming Twitter use that scares some people away. And I often don’t have time for that, even if I enjoy it. If I’ve been tied up all day working on something else, I just want a quick look at what people are saying about innovation in journalism. So I go right to my journoinnovation list. If I want to see what newsroom leaders are tweeting about (won’t take long; they don’t tweet a lot), I can do that. Or I can check in quickly with eastern Iowans or Iowa politicians. Or if I need a laugh, I go right to my humor list.

Use Twitter tools. I don’t use Tweetdeck (tried it once and a glitch kept me from getting the benefit I was seeking), but I know a lot of tweeps who were using it to organize their tweeps long before Twitter added its lists feature. Tools such as TwitterLocal, Trendsmap and Nearby Tweets help you find tweeps in your community or monitor what the community is tweeting about. Other tools such as MustExist and HourlyPress highlight the hot links on Twitter for you, similar to Twitter Tim.es. Hashtags and search (be sure to check out the advanced options) help you find tweets only about a particular topic.

I am sympathetic to the challenges of time management using Twitter or any new tool that demands our attention. I am not sympathetic to time management as an excuse for refusing to stay current with the demands of digital journalism. Twitter is important for journalists. Make time for it. Learn to use it, and use these tools and techniques to integrate it into your day.