Yesterday, I talked about how social media time management needs to start with looking at your goals, tools and strategy. Today, I’ll show how those three items influence where you spend your time with social media. I’ll close with some practical tips I’ve discovered along the way.

Again, I’ll use myself as an example.

My goals are to learn about social media and to build a following/fan base for promoting my book when it’s published. My strategies are giving back, adding value and meeting new people. How does that affect how I spend my time?

I skim a lot of the content that streams by. I’m looking for a few things: interesting topics to pass on or retweet, cool people to follow and stuff I’m interested in. Things that jump out at me? Networking, iPhone, social media, netbooks, economic news, small biz advice and funny stuff. I mostly ignore quotes, though attributed quotes will catch my eye if I like the author. Posts on these topics are most likely to meet my strategic needs of finding interesting people or content to pass on.

I also look for the names or avatars of people I know often post good stuff. My eye will slow down when I scan past them.

Do I miss stuff by scanning? Sure, but I can’t take the time to read in detail everything that goes by. I’m pretty ruthless to stick to the topics or people who will advance my goals. Everyone else goes by at top speed.

That probably raises the question of how do I decide who to follow? I follow people who are likely to advance my goals. And if someone I start following doesn’t post things of interest to me, I drop them. That puts me firmly in the camp of someone who does not auto-follow everyone who follows me. It’s a choice I made, and others make a different choice, but I made it to be true to my goals and strategy.

If you follow me, you probably notice that I tweet in bursts. That’s because I find blocks of time to engage. I deliberately plan to get to meetings 15-20 minutes early. Then I pull up Twitterific on my iPhone and scan my stream. I abuse the “favorite” function to mark things to review later on the computer. Scanning is easy on the phone. I can burn through 100-150 tweets in 15 minutes. Actually reading content is much faster on the computer, and that’s part of how I manage my time.

I turned off the “notify by email” function when I am followed or direct messaged. Until I did that, I was wasting a ton of time reading and deleting those emails. No more!

I only check who is following me a couple of days a week. In the early days, I checked several times a day and scanned for who to follow back. Now I’ve learned that the great majority of people who follow me are bots who will unfollow me in 24 hours or less. Fine, I didn’t want to waste my time with them anyway. Waiting for them to unfollow me saves time. Oddly enough, my rate of actual follower accumulation has increased, not decreased since I started that.

And I review regularly who I am following. If someone is wasting my time, I unfollow. My time is precious. No need to waste any of it.

I hope this has been helpful. Anyone else have any tips to share? Looking forward to them in the comments!