I spend a pretty fair amount of time in the social media universe. While I spend time talking with folks through digital mediums, I also spend time talking to people in the face-to-face realm. So what happens when your face-to-face time increases and, as a result, your access to the digital world is diminished? If you’re a blogger, then the limited digital time you have should be devoted to your blog.
Be selfish with your time
Over the last several months, I’ve found myself in a cycle where finding time to write four times a week is tough. When I think about that a year ago I somehow managed to post seven times a week, I’m surprised by this situation. So I’ve been thinking about how I can make more time to write. It’s important to me to find a solution because, as a blogger, this site is the center of my social media universe.
As I thought about it, the answer became clear. Get rid of some social media networks completely and spend less time on others. Earlier today, I took action and completely eliminated the following three sites from my life:
- Empire Avenue – It’s a gamification of popularity that treats your social media personnel like a company in a stock market. I spent a few hours there over a several-day span months ago. Then for the last several months, I deleted the spam they emailed me each day. Today, I fixed that and removed my account and revoked their access to my Facebook account.
- Klout -This is an attempt to measure influence in the social media space by attaching a score between 0 and 100 to you. Even though I’ve written flattering posts about the service in the past, this post helped changed my mind after the most recent round of algorithm changes. I still believe there was real hope and promise for what Klout could have been when I got interested during BlogWorld last fall in Las Vegas but the service just didn’t live up to that promise.
- Triberr – This is a network for mutual sharing of blog posts that perhaps I just never really understood. I hear they are making changes to fix a few things; but I just don’t have the time. I share posts I find in my RSS feed and the folks I followed in Triberr are there anyway.
That’s just the beginning of the trimming. I suspect that by paying attention to my spam email several more sites will go by the wayside shortly. The point is to remove distractions from your social media presence and focus on where you can make a difference and be the most useful.
Selfish doesn’t mean ignore people
My goal is to have more time to blog effectively and then be more engaging with the social media channels in which I choose to remain active. You’ll still find me on Twitter, Google+, Facebook and even Foursquare when I am traveling. While I don’t think any of these networks are perfect, I find them all useful for different parts of my personal and professional life. When I’m pressed for time, you won’t find me on any of these networks as much but you will find my posts here.
I really like that you took the time to explain why you are unplugging from these networks, Jim. You could have just dropped out of sight with no rhyme or reason. Instead, you detailed it out here where it belongs. I have only let go of Klout so far and I gave a small explanation of that in a thread on Facebook. Your post makes me feel like I should give a better one.
Shelby, I’m curious if what you like about this post is was written as a stream a consciousness? I think it’s fair to tell the audience it required a hard edit on your part and then me adding some content for clarification. The end result is the reader gets a peek inside the way my brain works when making decisions.
I think this is something many people are struggling with. Where do we spend our time? What networks are most valuable? When is it time to cut some of them loose to give proper attention to the networks we think matter most?
Well I can tell you Twitter isn’t going anywhere in my life anytime soon. Heck, I met you there 🙂
You could write on just this subject for a year. Blogging, a frequently updated web site, is the core of any successful marketing or informational campaign. Everything else feeds it.
Isn’t that pretty much what I do here Randy? I mean if you watch what I’m doing not what I’m saying. Actions speak lounder than words and both you and I deliver fresh pertinent content day after day, week after week, month after month and slowly but surely it pays off 🙂