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Good morning, good afternoon, good evening and welcome back to day eight of this 28 days of productivity series.

Today I want to remind you that bookmarks aren’t just for books! 

For those of you who don’t know me, my name is Tristan Griffiths and you can find me as @ImTristanG across all the socials, please do reach out to me and connect with me wherever you most like to spend time.

Now it might seem crazy to say to you that bookmarks aren’t just for books, but if you’ve been on the internet for any period of time, you’ll know that you can bookmark things across the web.

We quite often bookmark web pages, and maybe articles that we want to go back and read, but today I want to talk to you about shaving seconds off of revisiting social profiles, pages and resources that you want to access on a regular basis.

I’m gonna give you a really quick demonstration, and show you the amount of time that you could save.

But before I do, I want you to think about the fact that the average user is accessing Facebook around about 50 times a day. So if we could shave a couple of seconds off every interaction, and every link click to get through to a page, a profile or a resource, then we’re gonna be shaving a lot of time off.

Over weeks and months that’s gonna add up and really start to change how long it takes you to do things.

Remember, it’s sometimes about marginal gains, and they will add up over time to make a massive difference to how you utilise social media, how you show up online and really the ultimate amount of time it takes you to carry out any given tasks online.

I’m gonna show you really quickly a real life demonstration.
I’ve just got my browser open where I’m going to show you exactly how we can utilise this.

Now across Facebook, for example, we use a whole range of different pages and profiles, and I have two different folders in my bookmarks bar; one called ‘Facebook Fast‘, one called ‘LinkedIn Fast‘, just abbreviated to FB Fast and LI Fast.

If I click on my Facebook one, you’ll see that I have a range of different bookmark here; 

• Some four are pages like ItsNomad9 and ImTristanG.
• Some for the groups that we run, like our mentoring groups and our free social media training groups.
• And some communities that we’re a part of, like the Agora Pulse Ambassador Group and the StreamYard community

These take me straight into the profiles, and pages that I’m interested in.

It’s important to understand the speed at which that happens!

From the ImTristanG page, I demonstrate within Facebook how long it takes to get to ItsNomad9 using the search bar;

• Click search bar
• Type Search 
• Load Results
• Click Page Link

Now it doesn’t seem to be a long process, but if you think about typing it in, loading the page, clicking through, you’re actually doing two or three different things to get here.

Whereas if you have the bookmark set up; 

• Clicking Bookmark Folder
• Clicking onto the page you want

….and you are going straight to that page, saving one or two seconds every time that you do that!

If you total that up with the number of times you access your own business page or your profiles, or maybe specific resources that you go back to; Maybe it’s a video, or maybe it’s a post you’ve made.

By adding these bookmarks and accessing them through your bookmarks rather than through search, you’re literally gonna save seconds of time every single time you do it which, cumulatively, is gonna add up to a lot of time!

I talked primarily about pages, profiles, groups and communities, when I talk about Facebook, but on my LinkedIn folder, you’ll see I’ve bookmarked specific posts I’ve made.

The reason for this is that they are posts with a call to action that are likely to get engagement from people where I might want to go back, and check in on those comments.

One of the competitive advantages this gives you, is that by using bookmarks instead of relying on the platform, it means that when there’s a bug in the notifications centre of whatever social platform is, you can still get directly to that content.

From time to time, platforms have issues with their search functionalities on with their notifications, this is a way to guarantee you can get back to that type of content quickly, easily and to take control off your access to those things.

When I said to you that bookmarks aren’t just for books, it might seem like a very quick, very simple tip. But you would be surprised the number of people that don’t use bookmarks when it comes to social media.

They generally use them for articles, websites, web pages, but within social we think that everything’s so well connected that we rely so heavily on the platform.

Today I want to encourage you, start bookmarking those pages, profiles, communities, that you access a lot and do it not just on your desktop, but on your mobile as well, so you can access those things much more readily.

One thing I do need to say is that if you’re doing it on mobile, obviously it’s designed for the browser versions rather than the app versions, but generally you’ll find within the apps.

The apps tend to be faster to load as a priority, because they’ve been built mobile first. So this is more for speeding up the process as a whole, but also, you need to consider that it actually allows you to carry on functioning even when certain elements of the platforms break, like the notifications or the search features and functionality.

Just recently, I’ve loaded up Facebook and ended up with completely blank pages and blank results. But I could still navigate because of the bookmarks that we’ve put in.

So start bookmarking those pages, profiles, and resources that you need to access quickly.

It might be your page, profile, community, group.

It might even be a video that you’ve shared that you regularly want to direct people to.Put that in your bookmarks so you can go straight to it, grab the link and pass it out to them.

Another great way to do this is to have redirect set up on your website, but that’s something we’re gonna touch on later on in this productivity series.

For today I want to encourage you start bookmarking those social pages, profiles, groups and communities that matter to you, and make sure that you’re making it as productive and as easy for you to get to them when you need to, so that you can utilise them, shaving time off of your day, and making yourself more productive.

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