I don't want to be on social media at all.

Granted, I've met some brilliant people I consider friends over the years on social, but I would much prefer not to be a part of the firehouse.

Plus, there are many more things I'd rather be doing than spending almost 2.5 hours per day on social media (as that's the average screen time for social media in 2020).

But I'm also a realist in that I understand to be in business today, I need a presence on social media.

If Twitter weren't here, I most likely wouldn't be talking with you today.

I can honestly say that I've used Twitter Search and notifications to the max over the past 10 years.

🎯 It's found me project opportunities and allowed me to be first in line.

✋ I've jumped into the middle of conversations of angry customers of platforms to help where those platforms dropped the ball.

"How do you do this?"

I'm not sitting on the feed waiting for something to happen.

I've created a process and automation so that I don't have to be.

It is my longest-running piece of automation in my business.

It has evolved over the years, but the basic gist is this:

1. Use Twitter Advanced Search for specific keywords and accounts that tie directly to services in my business. (Hint: include a "?" into "This exact phrase" for questions since that's what people who need help use)
2. Then look at the results. Are they something I can add value to.
3. If they look good, use Zapier and build the same query and then pass the Tweet's URL into my Slack channel.

I also have Google Alerts set up with similar automation. And recently found a new tool called F5bot.com that monitors Reddit, Hacker News, and Lobsters.

Slack can create a channel email address.

Since Google Alerts and F5Bot send email notifications, I forward those emails to my Slack channel and archive them. Now I'm not distracted by the email but have all the possible social media leads and conversations in one place inside Slack.

This can be done for Facebook Groups, Linkedin, job boards and just about anything you want to monitor online, as well.

Now there's no reason to spend countless hours on social media in the name of "business."

The key is to be as specific as you can with your search criteria not to get a bunch of garbage. But it doesn't take too long to narrow the search to be helpful once you get it all set up.

So if I were to be conservative here and say that I saved an hour per day since January 1, 2020, that would be 476 hours, which is just shy of 20 full days. (When in reality, I've had this automation running since 2014.)

How much time are you spending on social in the name of business?