I know many professional organizers who are not taking advantage of Facebook to market their businesses. Their reasoning is sound: “I help my clients to make the best use of their time and space. It just doesn’t make sense for me to waste time on Facebook or other social networks.”

If you associate Facebook with playing games such as Farmville or Mafia Wars, poking friends, or completing quizzes like “How many kids you will have?” I can understand why you wouldn’t see how a Facebook presence can be beneficial to your business. Keep in mind, however, that you can be on Facebook without ever participating in these types of activities. Although new applications are added every week, taking a moment to block these applications from your news feed will save you from spending time and energy filtering through the updates of your friends who like to use them.

Here are three more ways to make sure that Facebook doesn’t distract you from more important activities:

• Use Networked Blogs or another application to automatically post an update when you publish something to your blog.
• Use an external application such as TweetDeck or HootSuite to post updates without logging into the Facebook website.
• You can also pre-schedule your updates using TweetDeck or HootSuite. Take advantage of this to post helpful tips at various times throughout the day and/or week, even while you’re out working with clients. This keeps your name in front of your target audience, and allows you to increase the frequency of your updates without having them all show up one after another.

Although these strategies allow you to maintain a presence on Facebook without even logging into the site, it is important that you visit the site on a regular basis in order to communicate with other users, especially those who have commented on your posts. The name of the game is social media, and if you don’t engage with others, they will stop trying to engage with you. You should be able to manage this in 15 minutes or less per day. That is not a lot of time, so you’ll want to use it wisely. Give priority to:

• Checking your notifications, to see if anyone has responded to any of your comments, and
• Visiting your business page, if you have one, because comments posted on there will not normally appear in your news feed or notifications.

In addition to blocking frivolous applications as noted above, you can organize your friends into groups. When you visit Facebook, instead of the default news feed which lists all of your friends, go directly to the feed for the group(s) that you most want to stay connected with.

Once you have completed these three steps, if you haven’t used up your 15 minutes, you can explore other things that may be going on. If you tend to get distracted, set a timer so you don’t get off track. If you’d also like to use Facebook for sharing news and photos with family and friends, do that at a different time, not during the 15 minutes allotted to your business.

Try it for a couple of weeks, then come back and share your results!

While you’re on Facebook, be sure to “like” my page, if you’re not already a fan.

Photo credit: Beth Kanter