Coping with Social Media Overload
I read an interesting article in USA Today recently, Social Media Users Grapple With Information Overload. It addresses the hardship of keeping up with a constant barrage of tweets, texts, blogs and instant messages.
The concerns are real enough. However, social media tools will be key for making innovation happen in the future so we need to find ways of coping with this.
My advice is quite simple:
- Reason: Find out what you want to get out of the tools. Is it to gain or share insights or both? If you put some thought into this, you are better prepared when you look into the many options.
- Focus: Once you know what you would like to get out of social media tools, you need to focus. There are so many options and you cannot cover them all. Focus, focus, focus.
- Filter: This ties back to focus. Tools such as TweetDeck (a Twitter application) are very good at helping you filtering the information flow and thus keep your focus. Find and use them.
This is intended to be a discussion. You got my input. What do you think?
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Stefan Lindegaard is a speaker, network facilitator and strategic advisor who focus on the topics of open innovation, intrapreneurship and how to identify and develop the people who drive innovation
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Interesting read!
I can relate in a sense that I also have information being presented to me via various different channels; Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Insta.gram, Foursquare, oh and ofcourse also e-mail and phone. For most channels I use Tweetdeck, but there are many other tools that offer the same integration. I just like Tweetdeck because of the look and feel, the ease of use, etc. I can create one update and post it to various different profiles with just one click of a button. Love it!
When I first started using all the different channels more intensively I became an ‘information junkie’ – I was actively looking for news and updates. All the time. Then I reached the point of ‘information overload’ and suddenly that same flow of constant, neverending information started bothering me.
I am founder and president of Canine Life Support, a charity working in Sri Lanka (more info on FB) so not only do I have my personal profile page on Facebook, I also maintain the group page with almost 6000 members who want to stay up to date with our activities. Not only do I have a personal Twitter account, I also have a Twitter account for Canine Life Support. Same goes for Linkedin, where I also manage a group page.
I needed to filter.
My solution was to put ‘off-line days’ in my schedule. Days where I live IRL (In Real Life) and I let the virtual world be. And guess what? The next day it was still there and I had a clear head. Another rule which I have is to put my iPhone into flight mode when I go to sleep. Besides taking myself offline, this might actually also have some benefits to your health because studies show that all the wi-fi networks everywhere are not at all harmless, let alone the always present cellular signals.