Social media can take over your life if you’re not careful. Personally, I fight a constant battle to keep my social media activities in check and a healthy, balanced part of my life rather than a monster that consumes my free time, energy, and steals from my family.
I found this great little video over at Fast Company on how to master your social media monster:
These are great suggestions, no? I’m curious as to how you’re coping with the barrage. What are some tactics you employ to tame the social media beast?
Those are some great suggestions. I already use many of those tactics to some extent. As you may have noticed, I now do a majority of my tweeting late at night. I try to stay logged out of Tweet Deck for a majority of the day aside from a quick glance before starting my work day and then a little at lunch. I pretty much only check the feeds that are in my favorites column and also browse through my mentions column, as tweeps that I generally engage with reside there. I do need to create multiple categories on Tweet Deck though and should probably just sync them with my lists on Twitter proper. I used to have updates from about 25 select Facebook friends and the same about of people I follow on Twitter be sent via SMS. I’ve retained the FB SMS updates but dropped those from Twitter down to about five. The reason for that is I check my favorites at night, as I stated, but unless FB’s latest release allows categories (I haven’t scoped it out yet), I find its news and update feeds to be impossible to keep up with, so I really don’t see a vast majority of updates from friends or people I follow. Throughout the day I’ll reply, comment, ‘like,’ or retweet updates that come to my phone if I have time; otherwise I’ll either save the message in my phone’s inbox to take action later or just delete it if I don’t feel inclined to do so (that’s the case about 80% of the time). This isn’t a perfect fix though, as my phone vibrates constantly and I still miss out on 90% of updates on both FB and Twitter. Should I delete some friends and follows? Probably. Once I have the time, I’d like to cut my follows in half. That’s easier to do than with FB friends, as I’d only be severing half of the relationship (assuming the follow is a follower). OK that’s all I’ve got for now…
*Long paragraph and typos brought to you by my thumbs and mobile device*