Time Management and Social Media

Traveling with my husband ministering at prophetic events.

Our oldest started grade 1 this year! How exciting, and how challenging at the same time.

 

Finding my feet and my place in the “mom collective” at our son’s school hasn’t been easy. I grew up and studied in Germany, the South African way of doing school is absolutely different from what I knew as school. Even the things 1st graders do here are different!

Plus, although I do my best mastering the Afrikaans language, it does happen that my son comes home from school with a word I have never ever heard of before. Enter social media. It is super nice to be able to quickly WhatsApp the teacher a picture of the word in question and get a prompt reply.

Vetkoek filled with mince

Or when its fundraiser day and its my turn to make and sell vetkoek and mince.

How wonderful to quickly be able to google the recipe and do my part to fundraise for new toys and playground equipment. I probably baked 200 of those…

 

Our upcoming preschool concert has me sewing costumes, cutting backing tracks and rehearsing scenes of Peter and the Wolf. Fun!

As far as blogging goes, between running a preschool, teaching our churches children’s church, giving violin lessons and playing in our worship band, blogging sure takes a back seat. But I definitely daily take the time to check the news and stay current. And this can be done really, really easy using twitter.

@chrisvanheerden

In talking with several wonderful friends recently I found that many people do not know how to really take advantage of the social networking microblogging service.

There are gazillions of Christians out there with twitter accounts of about 36 followers, and since there is never anything cool to read, they often haven’t been on twitter for month or even years.

And of course you get those who follow 7199 people and the content on their timeline is so confusing that it would take quite long to find out what’s current and important.

Apart from the search function in twitter that lets you see the currently trending #hashtags (anything that is moving people in that moment in the country you chose to search there is another way to curate your twitter content.

You can sort accounts that have a specific contend into lists.

A list is a curated group of Twitter accounts. You can create your own lists or subscribe to lists created by others.

That means you do not even have to follow all of the celebrities you like to stay in the loop with. Just create a list called Celebs and add anyone you are a fan of into that list. Later, if you want some celebrity news, just open that specific list.

Viewing a list timeline will show you a stream of Tweets from only the accounts on that list.

That’s how I can see all important international news at a glance without having to scroll through a thousand people’s interesting but more trivial comments first.

Here are a view examples of lists I compiled.

At the end of this blog I will teach you how to create your own lists.

If you don’t have to take the time to create a lot of lists, you could simply subscribe to already compiled lists like my NEWS list:

 

https://twitter.com/chrisvanheerden/lists/news-agencies

I also made a view other lists with interesting content of people who wont be very likely to follow me back but are interesting to follow (without really hitting “follow”)

Kingom (Christian personalities and ministries)

https://twitter.com/chrisvanheerden/lists/kingdom

VIPs, like heads of state

https://twitter.com/chrisvanheerden/lists/vips

and so on. You are welcome to subscribe to any of my list to save you time.

 

As a rule of thumb, I follow people who follow me, people who have interesting content and are willing to interact. And then I list those that are too high and mighty to follow back but who are important enough to be of interest.

This way, it takes only 3 min to scan through anything newsworthy, helping this busy mom to stay in the loop!

 

 

 

Using Twitter lists (in Twitter’s own words)

To create a list on Twitter for iOS:

1. From the Me tab, tap the gear icon 
2. Select View lists.
3. Tap the plus iconto create a new list.
4. Select a name for your list, and a short description of the list. The default setting for your list is public (anyone can subscribe to the list). To make the list only accessible to you, slide the switch next to Private to on.
5. Tap Save.

To create a list on Twitter for Android:

1. In the top menu, you will either see a navigation menu icon  or your profile icon. Tap whichever icon you have, then select Lists.
2. Tap the plus iconto create a new list.
3. Select a name for your list, and a short description of the list. The default setting for your list is public (anyone can subscribe to the list). To make the list only accessible to you, tap the checkbox next to Keep private.

 

I hope this helped you a little! See you on twitter!

 

Christiane