How do you manage your social media?

Over on JustBento I just posted about a new Pinterest board dedicated to bento ideas [1], as well as a list of all the social media places to find me. I don’t want to be redundant so if you are interested in finding me elsewhere, please take a look.

As I put together that list, I started thinking about all the time I put into those places. In a way it’s a lot of work, even though I do love interracting with people and everything. For me writing and blogging are now my fulltime job and top priority (I’m slowly ruminating at the moment about another book too), but these days staying within the confines of your own blogs is not enough, and you have to put yourself ‘out there’ so to speak. And it takes quite a chunk of time to do it properly.

Recently I tried tracking the time I spent on various tasks during the day. (If you’re interested in trackine where your time goes, I highly recommend the Emergent Task Timer [2] by David Seah, which is what I used. I’ve used this sheet periodically over the years when I’ve felt my time wasn’t being spent very well.) I spent a total of 12 hours (!) in front of my computer only 4 1/2 of which were spent on actual writing and research for writing projects. The rest was taken up by reading and replying to email, computer maintenance type things (I’m in the middle of reorganizing my photo archives), general reading and surfing, and so on. What really shocked me was that I spent more than 2 hours on social media things and other sites besides my own.

How do you manage your social media time? Do you find it cumbersome, or just fun? Is it a necessity for your line of work? Are there specific ways in which you use say, Facebook vs. Twitter vs. Google+ and so on?