SOCIAL MEDIA and networking services can be extremely useful and rewarding, but with the sheer number that exist on the web today, it can be quite overwhelming for all but the most ardent of social media enthusiasts. Whether you’re a fan of these services for personal use, such as keeping in touch with friends, or you’re using them as marketing tools for your business, it’s important to have a clear understanding of which services you’re using, how you’re using them, and your reasons for using them at all, otherwise you might be spending far more time than you need to duplicating content over multiple services, or sifting through information that really has no benefit to you anyway.

If you’re feeling a bit swamped by information overload, or just want to know how to manage all incoming and outgoing social media activity, read on ‘cause I have a five step guide to keep your sanity in check.

1. Simplify

The World Wide Web is a pretty big place. There are thousands of social networks out there spanning hundreds of different services, but the trick is to only use the ones that offer you value. Choose your social networking services carefully, and use them for dedicated purposes. For example, use Flickr for all of your photos, Facebook for keeping in touch with friends, Twitter for microblogging, LinkedIn for professional contacts, Last.fm for your music activity, Delicious for your bookmarks, and so on.

The simpler you make things, the easier it will be to keep track of activity later, because you’ll know exactly what you’re using each service for and the type of activity from your contacts that you’ll find on each service. Some services, or contacts within services will overlap, and that’s fine, just be aware of which ones these are so that you know to double up content, or filter out content later. If you’re worried that content on one service will be missed by contacts on a different service, fear not! Publishing content onto multiple services at once generally isn’t that much of a problem, but more on that later.

2. Aggregate

Just like you would use an RSS reader to collect and read website feeds, it can be helpful to organise social media activity, too. Even if you simplify things, you may find you still have a lot of activity to keep track of. The best way to do this is with a social aggregation application. I use Friendfeed which is a pretty powerful and useful web service in its own right. Its primary purpose is to mash together all the activity of your contacts over several different social networking services, and it has support for quite a few of them.

If your contacts also have Friendfeed accounts, subscribing to them is easy. However, a powerful feature of Friendfeed is the ability to create ‘imaginary friends’ which are basically people you want to keep track of on Friendfeed who do not have a Friendfeed account.

My main reason for liking Friendfeed is the way it helps to cut down information overload. You can can group people together and decide whether you would like their activity to show up within your home feed. You can also choose to filter activity based on certain criteria. For example, you can hide all Twitter comments from a certain individual only, or everyone you’re subscribed to. Later, if you decide you want to read the content you hid, it’s only a click away.

Friendfeed’s secondary purpose is to create a social network of its own, but as far as I’m concerned that only complicates matters. The best place to have a conversation around a piece of web content is at the source, so moving a conversation to a new location – in this case, on Friendfeed – is just bad organisation and management, in my opinion. Unfortunately, not everyone agrees with this mentality, which breaks up the conversation into several different areas on the web. On the other hand, this isn’t a feature you need to use, so personally I just ignore it and use Friendfeed for aggregation only.

There are other web-based alternatives to Friendfeed such as Socialthing, Profilactic, and Iminta, or desktop applications like Eventbox.

3. Segregate

Social media apps are great, but unless you use them as part of your job, they can be distracting and a major time-suck. They can threaten to take over your work space on your digital desktop, and not to mention easily pull you out of ‘the zone’.

The trick is to keep them separate from your work. If they’re hidden away, they’re less tempting to constantly look at. The way I do this is with an application called Fluid for Mac OS X (an alternative is Prism, available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux). It stops your web browser from becoming over-populated by tabs for social networking websites by allowing you to turn these websites into desktop applications of their own. They can then run completely within their own windows on your computer, and can be opened and closed just like regular desktop apps.

Alternatively, you could create a ‘Social Networking’ application and use it solely for that purpose. One of Fluid’s plug-ins allows you to create browser windows within browser windows, which can be viewable as a sidebar or a drawer. This can be useful for keeping track of multiple sites at once.

4. Steer

So, you’ve decided which social network services you want to use, and what you will use each service for. Now you need to decide where your content goes and when. In other words, team services together and create a workflow for your content.

Perhaps you want to post an image to Flickr, and then tweet the link over Twitter. Or you want people using multiple social networks to see the YouTube video you just uploaded. Obviously there are many different ways of doing all of this, and the methods you use depend on the services you’re using and the way in which you connect to the web.

There are a few different web services that allow you to post to several social networking websites at once such as Ping.fm, HelloTxt and Tarpipe. The latter, in particular, is a great service even though it’s still in beta, because it allows you to create workflows for publishing your social media content across several different social media applications. For example, I could create a workflow that allowed me to email an image to a specific Tarpipe email address, which would then post the image to Flickr, the URL would get shortened and posted as an update on Twitter, certain people would be sent the link in an email, and the image would also be saved within Evernote. Tarpipe differs from services such as Ping.fm in that the workflows are customisable, so you can decide on the exact path that your data travels, what it contains, and where it ends up. You can do this through a drag and drop GUI that resembles pipes being linked together through the different web applications that you want to connect.

There are also quite a few apps for mobile devices, such as ShoZu and AirMe, that allow you to publish content to different social networks. I’m constantly using an iPhone app called Flickup (iTunes link) which allows me to take a photo, upload it to Flickr and send the link to Twitter. This is only one of several apps with the same or similar functionality.

The best way to steer your content is to first decide where you want your content to go, and then figure out how to get it there.

5. Disconnect

No matter how organised you might be, if you want to stay sane and healthy, you need to disconnect from your social networks for a little while. Whether that’s by pulling the plug, closing the laptop lid, or just shutting down your browser for a little while, it definitely helps. It’s easy to feel like you’re possibly missing out on important content by disconnecting yourself, but the truth is that you’re probably not, and anything important or newsworthy will probably be making the rounds when you return. Besides, if you use a social aggregator, you can check the activity history later on.

So, there’s five steps to hopefully keep you sane amongst the chaos and information overload within social media services. Do you already use any of these methods? Or do you do things differently? Let me know in the comments!