Simplify Your Social Media
I was going to title this post, “Are Facebook Friends really Friends?”, but I think the social media that is eating up our time, and overwhelming us with too much information includes more than just Facebook. You participate in social media for two reasons, business or pleasure. If you aren’t careful about how you manage these venues, you won’t be doing any business or enjoying any pleasure. Instead, you will be juggling distractions and struggling to keep up with all of your “friends”.
I remember in the early days of the Internet, when chat rooms were scary, instant messaging was hip and if you were on match.com, you were really daring. Today, all of those things seem mainstream, instead of cutting edge. With Facebook, twitter, LinkedIn and others, we are encouraged to literally live a portion of our lives through social media. I think we thought that these sites would makes us more effective in business and keep us connected on a greater level, but like the effects of most high speed technology, our business efforts have become diluted and and our social connections, less genuine.
I think it is great that we can connect with friends and family through Facebook and follow interesting people on twitter, but it is important to remember to do it on purpose. We have to seriously consider how social networking websites affect our lives and act accordingly.
Choose Wisely - Before you “friend” or “follow”, ask yourself if you could call that friend if you needed help with something, or if you would have invited the “friend” into your life otherwise. Before you follow a tweep, decide if what they post will be of value to your life or your business. There is something to be said for a genuine connection and it is unlikely that you will achieve that, following thousands.
Communication – There used to be a time where no one knew what we were doing, every second of the day. There used to be a time where no one cared about that information. No one cares about it today. Share something of value or don’t share at all. You can only absorb and process so much information. Make sure you pay attention to the stuff that matters to you and delete the rest.
Connections - Today, people often assess their value by their number of “friends” or “followers”. Instead, place value on your actions and character. Go through your list of connections and decide which ones aren’t useful to you. Un-friending and Un-following is not personal. Ask yourself if you are connecting with someone via social media for business or pleasure, and make sure your list is in-line with your goals and values.
Time Management – You cannot be everywhere all the time, yet some of these sites leave you feeling like you are missing something, or can’t keep up if you aren’t there 24/7. Instead of doing a little here and there, choose the venue that works best for you. For instance, I check in with my Facebook account once a week or so and canceled my Linkedin account. That gives me more time to thoughtfully engage with twitter.
Reality - Are your connections online interfering with your connections at home, work, or in your neighborhood. The www is an amazing place to meet great people, and to learn and grow, but don’t forget to go for a walk with your family, call an old friend or make a new one. Make sure to incorporate technology vacations into your life. Break away for one day a week if you can. (Plan on an upcoming mini-mission for this!)
Distraction – You knew this was coming. Web surfing has always been a distraction to work, but today, when you can engage in a conversation with a “friend” at any time, instead of staying focused and doing meaningful work, you have to be vigilant about doing one thing at a time. If you are writing a proposal, shut down your other websites. If you are catching up on reading, don’t have TweetDeck chirping at you every .2 seconds with an update. Imagine trying to work, if an alarm went off every time anyone wanted your attention. When you are doing meaningful work, or having a phone or in person conversations, kill your email, alarms, text alerts, and any other distractions. You will be amazed at what you can give and take, when you do it on purpose.
I am reconsidering the time and energy I devote to social media sites. After careful consideration, I canceled my linkedin account, reduced (and continue to reduce) my facebook friends to people that I know, and would like to stay in touch with, and will redirect most of my social networking efforts to twitter, but in moderation. I don’t think there is a special number of friends or followers you should stick with. It all depends on what works best for you. For me, following less than 100 people on twitter, allows me to have quality interactions and not feel overwhelmed with information.
We cannot be available all the time, we cannot be consuming information all the time. We need time to be more and do less and only you can make that time for yourself.
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Very well written. I totally agree with you Courtney.
Nowadays it is not problem to follow people on Twitter, there is a lot of interesting one, but it is important to choose people, who can help, inspire you in business, personal development, etc.
I do it myself, that I follow people who can enrich my person by their interesting life stories, experience,… this also is valid about services I am using on my PC,… just to be in touch with their latest news.
In short: “Quality instead of quantity” – at least this works for me.
This post comes just at the right time because I’m reviewing social media use in my life. Twitter is fairly new to me and I’ve been a bit overwhelmed by the number of emails saying people are following me there. I’ve decided only to follow those I know – same policy I use with “friending” on Facebook. Though I want people to know about my blog, I don’t want it to happen at the expense of solitude, reading or other non-social media pursuits. Thanks for raising an important issue.
I’ve just cut out 200 people from my facebook contacts. While I value some of the information in contacts on FB, those 200 people were easy to get rid of – I can’t see myself ever contacting them in the future. It was really relieving to go through this process! It’s amazing how excess contacts can drag one down. Thanks for speaking out about this issue.
Lynn, Woo Hoo! Way to go. By following fewer than 100 friends or tweeps, I feel like I have an opportunity to genuinely connect.
I just wrote about the practice many people have of blindly accepting invitations to connect on social media. Why do we do this? Why do we not take the time to think through the value of the connection and then actually take action on it?
We all struggle with “connection envy” – and it is taking the joy and the meaning out of social media…
Todd – these are questions I have thought myself. Once you let go of the numbers and focus on individual connections..things get really fun!
Here are a few things I’ve done to simplify my “social media life” while remaining relatively connected and active:
1) Turned off all alerts for social media sites. I read somewhere that it takes our brain approximately 20 seconds to refocus our attention after it has been interrupted. If you’ve got new Tweet alerts, Facebook alerts, new email alerts, and any other kinds of alerts randomly popping up, your attention is taking a hit (and stress levels increase too).
Lets say you get a total of 50 alerts per day on your computer that demand your attention at random times during the day. Suppose it takes you 5 seconds to read each alert as it comes up and lets be a little conservative and say that it takes your brains 15 seconds to refocus. That’s four days per year you spend on alerts! Four entire days!
I turned my alerts off ever since realizing this. For email, I turned off Facebook notifications for everything except messages and friend requests. I want to be in control of when I give my attention away, not have it slowly nibbled at by a computer.
2) Accept that you will not be able to read everything that your friends post. There comes a point where you have so many friends that you could spend hours a day trying to catch up with everything. There just isn’t enough value being posted to make it worth that much time.
Instead, treat social networks like Facebook and Twitter as rivers of information that you occasionally sip from instead of trying to drink the entire thing. I never read all the messages posted on my Twitter & Facebook timelines. I when I login, I glance at what’s visible on the screen and if I see anything interesting, I retweet/reply to it.
3) Learn to become a pro at speedreading content (aka skimming). Learn to breeze through the fluff and grab the main points of each paragraph. After practicing this for a while, you’ll learn to recognize articles and blog posts that are particularly interesting to you and that you want to really read in depth.
I “read” hundreds and hundreds of blog posts every week in my RSS reader. I do this by skimming titles, discarding stuff that I immediately recognize as being of no interest and move on to the next. When I find something interesting that I feel I have something valuable to add, I’ll leave a comment (like I’m doing here).
4) Schedule tweets. Some people feel this makes you seem fake, but I totally disagree. In this world of information, you want to be sharing interesting and valuable articles. If you tweet ten blog posts in one hour and then nothing for the remaining 23 hours, it’s unlikely that a majority of your friends will even see what you tweeted (this is even more true if you’re someone like me and only read the last 20 or so tweets).
Since the Internet is global and you’re likely to have friends in multiple timezones, you can provide a constant stream of valuable information by spreading it out. This increases the chances that one of your friends will see one of the valuable things you’ve tweeted.
Whenever I process my RSS reader (about every 2-3 days right now), I retweet every article that I find interesting or valuable. But instead of sending the tweet out immediately, I use HootSuite to schedule the tweets, spacing them 2 or 3 hours apart.
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Other than that, it’s like you said about being careful who you choose to “friend”. When someone follows me on Twitter, I carefully decide whether or not to follow them. If they don’t seem like someone I would genuinely be interested in talking to (i.e., if I have absolutely nothing in common with them), then I don’t follow them back.
Great advice Raam! I am going to look into the tweet scheduling.
Courtney
It was interesting to know that “un-friending” someone is not personal. Sometimes you start to think someone will be upset or hurt because you dropped them or dropped the twit. I now realize they don’t know me at all. So I can now drop and pick up new twits without fear of recrimination.
Thanks for cutting to the chase
Timely message, Courtney. I’m burning out lately on social media, and I’m such a social media newbie (3 months in and it’s already too much). Today, I’m pulling back on who I follow on Twitter and I’ve blocked seeing a bunch of people on Facebook. Life has already reached a manageable pace. I also going to unfollow anyone who tweets more than 20 times a day. Enough already! As you say, the key is to be more and do less. Quality over quantity. Let the madness stop.
Courtney,
This really hits home with me. I’ve been on Facebook for about year and find it to be a big black hole that sucks up time, to be honest. I did start a fan page for Powered by Intuition – which is good. It’s really just another place to announce that you’ve put out another post; which is okay.
Twitter on the other hand…..I’m more burned out on. I really can’t think of much I want to say on there. I don’t have the time to look up all sorts of meaningful quotes, nor do I wish to announce to the world what I’m doing at the moment.
Paring down to the people who matter on all of these media makes sense.
Thanks for this excellent post….oh, and I’ll be Retweeting if you don’t mind! (we want to stop but we can’t….)
I am easily distracted in general and social media makes it worse! I now have set periods of time where I pay attention to it and then I ignore it to get something else done. I will look into Raam’s suggestion of HootSuite too. I also have my personal Facebook pared down to people I actually know.
On the topic of social media I was wondering if you had any recommendations for simple e-mail and/or rss reader systems? I don’t have twitter, linkedin, facebook – nothing like that. I have been asked to guest post to a mindfullness blog a couple of times but otherwise my internet presence is solely through comments (which I usually feel too shy to do unless I feel really helped/intrigued – like I have been with your blog, obviously!) and my e-mail and rss reader. I used to have hotmail but after no longer being comfortable with certain of their ways I got google mail – which I am beginning to re-think because of all of the flash and widgets and possibilities. I like their reader but there has to be a simpler way? Hope it’s okay that I ask