So, you have a normal 9 to 5 job. You are also addicted to social media like FriendFeed, Twitter and the rest. How do you balance your activities so nothing really suffers?
The first thing you must do is figure out what type of commitment you want to make to your social media sites. You can pick a few of your favorite social sites to focus on. If your day job is sitting in a cube or corporate office somewhere, then you will need to limit your activity in some way. If you want to be like Robert Scoble or Louis Gray, you will have to give up some sleep to stay active on several sites.
Personally, I like a decent amount of sleep and it helps with staying focused at work. So, I focus on a few sites, like Google Reader, Twitter and FriendFeed. I am a heavy user of Google Reader and I scan about 500 items per day and share almost 40 of them. That type of activity requires a significant commitment by itself. For Twitter and FriendFeed, I can only check in a few times per day.
Tools of the Trade
To increase your commitment on various sites, you can hook the sites together with RSS. For example, I have all of my Google Reader shared items being fed into FriendFeed. I also set up a special tag in Google Reader for those items that I want to send to Twitter. You can then use a tool like HootSuite, TwitterFeed, or even FriendFeed to read the RSS feed and send those items to Twitter. If you have a Facebook account, you can have your Twitter updates sent to Facebook as well to further spread out your activity.
Another small idea that can help with your interactivity is email alerts. Almost all of the social sites have a way to notify you through email if people are commenting on your posts, or even commenting in the same thread as you. This allows you to maintain the conversation without slavishly checking each site for comments. A similar feature that exists on Twitter (which does not have email alerts) is RSS feeds for your saved searches. So, you can setup a saved search, grab the RSS feed, and save it to Google Reader. You can also do the same with your Twitter mentions so that you never miss a mention. Third party tools help greatly with this, especially for Twitter where you have several excellent tools like Seesmic, TweetDeck, HootSuite and Brizzly.
Another way to control your activity better is to use each site for a specific reason. So, Google Reader is my news and blog reader. Twitter is my quick comment tool, or I may reply to some interesting comment. FriendFeed is where I may post something that I want conversation about. You might even use Facebook only for those updates that you want to go to your “real life” friends. Each site has its strengths and you should work with those strengths. Forcing Twitter to be your RSS reader, or on the other extreme making Google Reader the way you read much of your Twitter traffic is not the best idea.
Your Daily Schedule
Another important thing to do is to set up a daily schedule for yourself. As an example, I will use the schedule that I tend to follow. I wake up early and get to work early as well, so this schedule should modified to fit your daily routine. Generally, the boundaries of my day are 5AM and 10PM, and this gives me some buffer at night if I need it as well.
- 5:45AM – Before going to work, have a cup of coffee and spend 30-45 minutes checking social media:
- Read news and blogs in Google Reader
- Review Twitter for replies/mentions and various saved searches
- If you are a blogger, check your stats and make notes for your next posts
- 7:00AM – Once you are at work, do a final check of the same sites you checked before work
- 12:00PM – While eating lunch, do a full scan of your social sites for about 30 minutes:
- Review Google Reader
- Review Twitter for replies/mentions and various saved searches
- Scan FriendFeed for interesting posts and comments
- 6:00PM – Once you return home and have eaten dinner, you can dedicate a full 2 hours to social media interaction. I find 2 hours to be a good limit for me as I still can have time for my family.
An important thing to remember for us cube dwellers is that social media is not paying our bills. If your work load is very heavy one week, then you should scale back your social media activity. Even in social media, some things will be more important than others. As a software developer, Google Reader is an integral part of my job. I read plenty of programming related articles with Google Reader, so it will never be cut from my schedule. However, FriendFeed and Twitter will always be a lower priority if my schedule does not permit much time.
Just remember that social media is supposed to be about community. If you find yourself trying to compete with people like Robert Scoble or Louis Gray, you will typically lose. Scoble’s job is social media, so he basically gets paid to use sites like FriendFeed and Twitter. In addition to being a tech blogger, Louis Gray helps companies with marketing and getting those companies’ marketing integrated with social media and the internet in general. Again, it is his job to use social media. Until you have a job like theirs, you can never be as active without having your work suffer. In this economy, your work cannot suffer, so you need to find some way to balance the time.
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