Facebook. LinkedIn. Twitter. All these social media communities can be immensely useful (and immensely fun), but they can also be a giant time suck. So how can you be smart about your social media world, maximizing the benefit you get out of staying connected and ensuring all those feeds and alerts don’t encroach too far into your offline time?

Gina Trapani, author of and a founding editor of Lifehacker.com, offered three tips to tame your out of control social media commitments recently on Fast Company.

Make social network activity come to you. Pick your primary channel of communication and route all your notifications from various services to come through it. For example, you check your email every day. Most every service can send you email alerts when you receive a message or get a new follower or comment. You can funnel Facebook messages, Flickr photo comments, Twitter direct messages, and LinkedIn questions all to your email inbox. (Don’t forget: if email alerts come too often, change your settings to reduce the volume.) Interact with multiple services from a single interface. If some of your friends use Facebook and others use Twitter and others update their own blog, keep up with all those news streams in a single place like your RSS reader, or a tool like TweetDeck or FriendFeed. You can maximize your time even more and broadcast updates to multiple services in one shot. From TweetDeck or Digsby, for example, you can post a status update to both Twitter and Facebook at the same time. Split up your social media accounts for personal and business purposes. You don’t want your boss to see that you’re tweeting from the beach on a sick day, and you don’t want your mom to read about the hot date you had last night. Designate different accounts for different purposes and configure your privacy settings accordingly.

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