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I’m delighted to present you an honorable guest here today – Hesham, the founder of Famous Blogger & MMOSocialNetwork to share some advises on managing busy social networking life. Without further ado, let’s roll out the red carpet:

First of all I would like to thank Ching Ya for inviting me to post on her blog today, it’s a great opportunity for me. I have titled this post close to the question she was asking and wondering about how I/we can manage our busy Social Networking life and still handling multiple projects/sites “wonderfully”!

OK, it’s a sunny day, so let me go to my backyard next to the swimming pool to get some inspiration while writing

Ok, that’s MUCH better!

How I Manage My Busy Social Networking Life

I really have lots of accounts on several social networks, I even run my own social bookmarks site at the same time, and also working on developing a new site called DesignGizer. Hopefully it will be ready by the end of the month, and in all cases I am trying to keep up with all my accounts and projects all together in one place, but this is not possible as each of my projects has a different type of back-end report system that I have to monitor separately, and at the same time each of these projects has it’s own accounts on social media sites, for example I have to create a Twitter account for each project, a Facebook Fan Page for each project, and so on.

So, talking about how I manage those several social networking accounts and projects and still can manage my person and offline life as well, I must say that there is no big secret or any hidden tools from any kind, until now I didn’t fall in love with a management tool better than HootSuite , Google Reader and my simple normal email account which keeping me updated with almost everything I want to know about!

Of course I had to used a powerful machine (laptop) to get all these working smoothly without problem and all at the same time.

My Laptop as a Tool

Maybe you know that before I became a bloggers I was working on the web-design field, and this is why I am used to powerful laptops, with big wide screens, I cannot survive with a 14” laptop anymore, so my Toshiba Qosmio laptop. I am using right now is a a very powerful one, it’s really helping me to do my work in a very easy and effective way, and also to keep up with all my social networks accounts as the big wide screen allows me to set more tabs on HootSuite to display them all together at the same time, which it’s impossible to be done with a small monitor laptop.

I remember you have commented on that post on My Life Thinking blog, that was so nice of you! I cannot deny that I was going for a Mac, but at the last moment I changed my mind because the Qosmio has 4 processors which is not available on Mac laptops yet, and to understand what I exactly do I have to mention that I never shutdown my laptop!

Actually, I am used to work on several projects at the same time since the beginning of my career, and what I mean by working on several projects at the same time is the ability to set priorities of tasks while you are opening each of your projects, so my powerful laptop allows me to open all applications I use at the same time without crashing, so let me tell you exactly what applications are running now on my laptop:

• Firefox browser with 2 open windows and 66 open tabs
• Google Chrome browser with 2 windows and 27 open tabs
• Internet Explorer browser with 5 tabs
• Notepad with 7 windows
• Open Office with 11 window
• Photoshop with 8 working projects
• Dreamweaver with 11 working pages
• Core FTP application

and some other applications that I use or I forgot to close them!

So, do you think I still need any other applications to give me extra information? I don’t know but I just have the feeling that everything is under my hands and control all the time while I am on my laptop, I can monitor all my social network pages, blogs, blog dashboards, and all other pages just by one click to the refresh all tabs button of a browser, and maybe now you got the idea and have a full picture of how I can do it without needing any extra applications, I even keep some blogs open on my browsers for days until I read interesting post before I close it, and the really beauty here is I save all my accounts passwords to the browser, and make use of the “Restore previous tabs” feature in case I have to restart my laptop for any reason.

In addition to what I mentioned above, I use some services like SocialOomph. Keeps me informed with who is retweeting me just in case if I missed something, and Tweepi is what I use to manage my Twitter accounts, and also a few Firefox add-ons like Google Wave Add-on to keep me informed with new waves I am part of. And of course I don’t want to forget that subscribing by emails to blogs RSS feeds and news letters is a very important thing because it’s easy way to get news early and ideas for my new blog posts.

My Nokia 5800 Cell Phone

By the way I am using the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic phone, it’s has kind of limited available applications compared to the iPhone, but like any other touch screen cellphones it’s a lot of fun to deal with, but not good as the iPhone of course but it does the work, I am using some nice applications on it like:

• Tweets60 to check my Tweets on the go
• Gmail application from Google
• Fring for Skype calls

Social Media Key of Success

The real key to success on Social Media in my opinion is to organize your networks accounts, email accounts and web-browser in folders, so there is a folder for everything and anything you can imagine on my email accounts and on the top of my FireFox browser toolbar, and it’s very important to check your emails regularly, and never leave some emails without a reply since you have opened it and read it, and what I mean by that is to check your emails more than once a day, and if you are on the road or a way from your laptop, simply connect via your cell internet service and check emails/reply to them if there is a need, and if it need some work to be done on your laptop then do it when you arrive to your small home office immediately, it’s not good to do the work “latter”, chances will not wait for latter.

Tools I Use to Manage My Projects

Talking about dealing with several projects, some of them are running, some other are under development, so it’s a little bit hard to keep myself motivated and concentrating on all projects if I am not using the old fashion way, I have tried every other possible way as a technology fan, but believe it or not, a simple paper or notebook and a pen is all what I really need!

I am sorry to disappoint you if you was waiting for me to list a great or a fancy tools and applications I am using, but I discovered that all these mind mapping software and other cellphone applications that reminds you on time that you need to do something important you set before is not working for me, I just find my self neglecting notifications all the time like if they don’t exists!

And this remind me with my manager at a company I worked for a few years back, he taught me this once, and told how to use a very simple technique to keep up with his daily/weekly tasks, and told me that he cannot work without his little piece of paper and whatever pen. I use the paper to write down main title of my projects, and I list all possible daily/weekly tasks under each title, when I finish a task I just mark it as done and forget about it, and so one, at least it’s the only way for me to see all of my projects going in one place, which is the paper!

One very important benefit of “pen and paper” way is it helps a lot on writing down ideas for new blog posts as well, or draw some charts, and basic layout of a design for example, I believe you know that Ching Ya because you are a designer, so probably you cannot live without a pen and a paper like me.

Hesham is a good friend, a hardworking blogger and designer that I’m sure you’re all familiar with his omnipresence in the blogosphere. He’s always commenting, supporting & setting up projects – I’m amazed with his ability to cope with so many things in one time! So I ‘drag’ him here to share his secrets of success regardless how busy he is. Thank you my friend! Don’t forget to follow him @famousbloggers.