How to avoid being overwhelmed and consumed by social media?

In the past, it used to be e-mail and meetings that consumed everyone’s time, and now it is e-mail, meetings, and social media, and not necessarily in this order. For years, in our workshops, we talked about the e-mail overload, and taught ways to overcome the e-mail overload, and now we are broadening the scope to include social media.

So how do you reduce the social media overload?

Here are some ideas to get you started:

• Be Strategic: Don’t just be there, but be there with a clear purpose.
   
• Follow the relevant people: Those that add value and not just chatter.
   
• Stay on brand: One of Jason Alba’s advice that I keep re-iterating.
   
• Reuse: Create high value content and reuse it in all platforms, you know they now all link to each other, so you can more easily leverage your content in multiple platforms.
   
• Time yourself: Don’t just be there indefinitely, make it 5, 15, or 40 minutes (again with a clear purpose)
   
• Don’t treat it like a homework (especially twitter): You don’t have to keep up with what happened when you were gone. What happened before is mostly old news by now.
   
• Remember that the time you spend on it needs to be proportional to the number of people you have in your network (otherwise, it is better investing time to growing your network).

For more tips about managing interruptions (social media and others), refer to The Accomplishing More With Less Workbook now available at Amazon.com (check out the reviews)!

Comments

[jackie alcalde marr]

These are great points - I imagine we all feel a little overwhelmed (especially those of us over 30!) Your idea of being strategic is so valuable. I think many of us are exploring, trying new channels of connecting and communicating. But, we will soon recognize which channels are valuable to us, which people to follow on Twitter, and which to drop. Each of us has a different threshold - it's important to remember that social media should be helpful, not burdensome. Sure, there's always a learning curve, but don't feel guilty for disconnecting those tools that drain your energy needlessly!