6 Ways To Get Organized And Centralized With Social Media

Get organized and centralized now using Social Media.

One of the easiest and best ways to get organized is in managing and manipulating your News Reader to get the most out of it. My personal News Readers of choice is Google Reader (but you can get organized with whichever one you’re most comfortable with).

Here are 6 ways to use a Reader to get more organized and centralized with Social Media:

1. Create folders. While many people love the "river of news" and how the content just flows into the Reader as it is published, Google Reader allows you to create folders. It’s shocking to see how few people use this to get organized. One trick is to create a *TOP folder which should consist of your "must-read" Blogs and news sources. The "*" will bring this list – alphabetically – to the top. You can organize the rest of your folders by industry, specific types of people, geography, etc…
2. Star, share or read later. Starring content is a great way to get inspiration for Blog posts, Podcast episodes or even fodder for Twitter and/or Facebook, but sharing the content is a great way to allow people to publicly see what you have to be the most relevant and important content (it’s also much more social). Instapaper is another great tool which allows you to read content later in a very simple way (and it has an amazing iPhone app that compliments the experience). Having the content flow in is one thing, actually diving into it and reading it is another. Having a good personal strategy around aggregating and reading content is critical to being more efficient.
3. Pull your Alerts into your reader. If you’re not using Google Alerts, you’re probably missing a ton of great content. Alerts don’t have to come via email only. Google Alerts now enables you to create a feed for the alert. By subscribing to that news alert in your Reader, you can actually centralize more and more of your content. Think of your Reader as your personal NORAD system.
4. Create more dynamic alerts. Don’t just stick to your brand names, products, services and key management people. Start tracking your competitors, their key terms, the key industry leaders and even cast the net wider by looking at more generic industry terms, the cities you serve and beyond.
5. Subscribe to those who inspire you. Whether it’s in Delicious or through someone’s Google Profile, more and more people are sharing their content publicly. Most platforms offer the ability to subscribe to that individual’s feed of the content they’re publicly sharing. You can pull that feed into your own Reader and get a peak into the mind’s eye of the people you respect and follow (plus, the serendipity of following their content may help you discover newer sources of information and inspiration).
6. Pull your Twitter Search into your reader. While platforms like TweetDeck are great at creating a holistic view of the Twitter ecosystem, Twitter Search also enables you to create a feed based on a search query. Much in the same way that Google Alerts works, you can now grab these specific Twitter Search feeds and pull them into your Reader, further consolidating and organizing your content while centralizing everything.

Any other cool tips and/or tricks in getting your Social Media organized and centralized?