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When used strategically, social media can maximize your chances of business success more effectively than just about anything else. But if you’re not careful, social media can eat you up and spit you out before you can say “Tweet Me.” Here’s how I keep from being thrown to the social media lions.

1. Establish a routine. Like many things in business, social media outreach can be scheduled in advance. I devote specific blocks of time each week to different outlets. I do vary my routine. After all, social media is “social,” and you cannot always predict which direction a conversation will take you. I generally move in and out of social places during certain times of day, keeping the rest of my day free for projects, meetings and responding to phone calls and email.

2. Automate a small number of Tweets, and schedule FaceBook updates. I once automated Tweets frequently in the name of efficiency, but I stopped because I think authenticity and real-time presence serves me and my friends and customers best. The one category of scheduled Tweets I think is helpful is the re-sharing of relevant blog posts. For example, a few times a week, I automate re-posts of articles I think will be useful, but which people might have missed when they were originally published.

I automatically feed blog posts to my FaceBook Profile Page and Business Page. I do not automatically feed my blog to Twitter. I manually Tweet my posts so they are conversational in and of themselves.

While FaceBook updates cannot be automated in advance, they can be planned for in advance, so I plan appropriate posts for the week in advance.

3. Hire help. As you use social media, you’ll discover patterns that others can duplicate so you can focus on leading your business. For example, my assistant ensures that my feeds are accurately posted to FaceBook. She duplicates podcast announcements at my FaceBook events tab and my social network’s events calendar. These activities are important, but they do not require my hands on attention. Having someone else perform them frees me to focus on things only I can handle.

4. Use A Reader. I use Google Reader to aggregate blog feeds I read each day. It is unnecessary to visit all of the blogs you love one at a time. Push them to Reader where you can see all of them at once. If you see something you want to comment on, it’s easy to click the post to leave your comment, then return to the reader to skim for more posts.

How do you tame the social media beast?

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