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One Great Way to Increase Email Productivity and Social Networking Connectivity

Guest post by: Sally Witzky

Article Overview: Many people struggle with spending too much time in email and not enough time working on meaningful projects or income-producing work. Complicating the issue is the integration of social networking sites and increasingly making connections there that will eventually pay off for sales or other purposes. Many sales and marketing professionals and business owners are looking for ways to increase productivity without sacrificing time that could be better spent elsewhere. We've found that Microsoft Outlook and Blackberry users can increase productivity and save time by using an add-on tool called Xobni. The functionality of Xobni goes beyond saving time but actually helps to make connections and communicate with people in the way that they prefer, whether on Facebook, Skype, LinkedIn or Twitter.

One Great Way to Increase Email Productivity and Social Networking Connectivity

One of the questions we get asked a lot by business owners is "how can I easily maintain my social networking connections without it taking so much time?"

If you're a Microsoft Outlook email user, and you have not yet tried Xobni ("inbox" spelled backwards), then you owe it to yourself to check out this remarkable add-on tool to better manage your email inbox and your social networking connections. Better yet, if you also use a Blackberry, the two work really well together as well.

You can start out with the free version and upgrade to the Plus version if you need to (a one-time fee of $29.95 which we felt was worth it).

Our biggest "aha" moment came when we realized that we were getting a lot of email from people that we had not yet connected to on LinkedIn. Xobni tells us that right away. Not only that, but all we need to do is click the "add" button and we can send a LinkedIn invitation message while we are in Outlook.

We calculate that in the last two months that we've been using Xobni, we added about 75 or more excellent contacts to our LinkedIn profile.

The second "aha" moment showing the power of Xobni was how easily it sorted the emails in our inbox. It made finding an attachment that a client sent so much easier. Now if you're someone who is super organized with your email inbox, then you may not find this much of an advantage. But if you're like the many people who organize or archive by date or just don't make the time to organize your email inbox into folders, then it provides a very easy-to-use solution.

There are many other benefits of Xobni beyond increasing connections on LinkedIn and finding emails and attachments from those who send us email.

• We love the fact that we can more easily identify a contact's Twitter account and that we can read their Twitter feed or retweet one of their messages right from Xobni, which sits to the right-hand side of the Outlook screens.
• We can even view contact information and photos about our connections from LinkedIn, Facebook, Skype, and Hoover's and it even integrates with Yahoo Mail.

We beleive this is one of the best email and social networking productivity tools we've seen. And the more we use it and realize how it saves us time and gives us functionality we didn't have before, the more we are in love with this simple and inexpensive add-on. Try it out and let us know what you think.

P.S. We have no relationship with Xobni other than we are a user and obviously a big fan.

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Article Tags: blackberry users, business owners, email productivity, facebook, finding attachments in email, inbox, increasing linkedin connections, linkedin, microsoft outlook users, outlook, sales and marketing, searching outlook email, social networking, social networking productivity, social productivity tool, xobni



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