friendfeed
Managing Social Media Burnout
A reporter from CTV News came to Magnify Digital today to ask what advice we could offer to people with social media burnout. Turns out, managing time spent on these all-consuming networks is a popular new year’s resolution. You can see why it would be. The problem is there’s no on/off switch for social media. It’s always on. And we have more and more ways to connect to it. Through our computers, our phones, other handheld devices. Never before has social media been so prevalent and accessible.
Here are some tips on how you can reclaim some of your personal time:
- Limit the amount of time you spend on social networks. Even go as far as setting timers, to remind you when to step away.
- If you’re spreading yourself too thin trying to maintain multiple profiles across several networks, ditch one or two. Focus on fewer channels; maybe even just one.
- Consider dropping a friend or acqaintence if they’re too chatty and constantly require too much of your social time online. If that feels too harsh, then resist always giving him/her a response. You’ll train them to stop expecting it… and hopefully, asking for it too.
- On Facebook, turn off your chat function. That way, if you’ve limited yourself to ten minutes on Facebook, you won’t get caught using 8 of those 10 minutes on a chat. To find this function, look to the bottom right of your personal profile page. If the circle beside chat is green, you’re open for business. Simply click on this to open the chat function, select ‘options’ and ‘go offline’.
- If having a daily presence on social networks is important to you, use tools that can post your content for you. You can pre-schedule messages using tools like Hootsuite to populate your Twitter profile, Facebook, LinkedIn, and many others.
- Likewise, Ping.fm & Friendfeed are two examples of tools that give you the “one-stop-shop” option. If you want to post a message to Facebook, Twitter and MySpace all at the same time – these tools will do that for you.
- Even location-based tools like Foursquare and Gowalla can be managed simultaneously. Gowalla recently integrated Foursquare, Tumblr, and Facebook into its platform.
- If you’re feeling burnt out from too many messages on Twitter – also referred to as a congested stream – free tools like Tweetdeck allow you to organize who you’re following into columns (like friend tweets only, tech tweets, foodie tweets, etc.). That way, you can limit how much you see without having to drop friends or people you like to follow.
- And finally, this post would not be complete without mentioning mobile apps! These little gems can be a friend or foe when it comes to helping manage burnout. Apps can simplify access to social media – but perhaps too much. Limit your use of applications just as you would the social networks they’re enabling.
What do you do to manage a threat of burnout online?
Erin
Tags: Apps, burnout, chat, Erin, facebook, foursquare, friendfeed, gowalla, HootSuite, LinkedIn, ping.fm, time management, Tumblr, tweetdeck, Twitter
Canada Day in Social Media
Photo Credit:wburris
Yesterday was July 1st, Canada Day. For 142 years, Canadians have enjoyed the true north, strong and free! Throughout Canada, people took part in celebrations in different provinces, different cities and different events, but through social media and the Internet, we can find out what the day was like for all Canadians, near and far, celebrating as one.
Do a quick search on Twitter , FriendFeed and OneRiot and you’ll see a real-time stream of what people got up to on Canada Day. (Note: these links lead to the search results).
Do a quick search on Flickr and see the many photos of concerts, fireworks, parties and of course, people decked out in Canadian flags.
Do a quick search on YouTube and Vimeo and you can watch the celebrations in cities that you have yet to visit.
Do a quick search on Technorati and BlogPulse and you can read the bloggers’ take on Canada Day.
Social media tools are connecting communities and their power lies in how these tools allow users to make their own connections. Imagine if we took the search beyond Canada Day and looked for conversations around your company event or your company brand? What would you see? What would you learn?
Listening and monitoring is a fundamental step in any online strategy. Are you making it a priority?
Victor
eMarketing Strategist
Tags: blogpulse, canada day, flickr, friendfeed, listening, monitoring, oneriot, Social Media, technorati, Twitter, vimeo, youtube
What can I do with my Blog’s RSS Feed?
A blog can be an important part of your business’ online marketing strategy. It may even be the cornerstone of your strategy. However, a key element in many blogs that can be overlooked and under leveraged is the blog’s RSS feed.
For a quick definition, RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. It is a standardized format used to distribute information that is frequently updated. The RSS feed can be read using a variety of RSS readers, one of which is the Google Reader.
So if you have a blog with an RSS feed, how can you better leverage this feature?
FeedBurner
Connecting your RSS feed to FeedBurner is a great way to track how many subscribers your feed is receiving. If you don’t measure performance you won’t know if what you are doing is paying off. In addition to tracking the number of subscribers, FeedBurner also has a suite of tools to help optimize and publicize your feed.
FriendFeed
FriendFeed is an aggregator that pulls together a user’s activity from many different social media profiles that the user can choose to link together with FriendFeed. It then displays a stream of the user’s activity. For example, you can connect your Flickr, LinkedIn, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Twitter and Youtube profiles into FriendFeed. Of course, you can also connect your blog to FriendFeed. The benefit of using this tool is that it extends the reach of your blog content. Whenever you publish a new blog post, people who subscribe to you on FriendFeed will be able to see it.
Twitter
Twitter is also a great way to extend the reach of your blog content. That is, provided that your blog posts offer real value to your followers on Twitter and that your Twitter account is being used for more than just your RSS feed. There are different ways for you to incorporate your blog content into Twitter.
First, you could manually type 140 character tweets about new blog posts and link to the post.
Second, you could use a variety of different Twitter tools that automatically sends a tweet when a new blog post is published. I will provide two suggested tools to use below.
- TwitterFeed is basically self-explanatory. You add your blog’s RSS feed to the tool and it will feed the new posts to Twitter.
- HootSuite, the better of these two suggestions, will automatically send a tweet whenever there is a new blog post, but will also track how many clicks the tweet received. This tracking feature and the host of other functions on HootSuite, make it better than TwitterFeed.
Facebook
If Facebook is a part of your marketing strategy, there are many apps available that will integrate your blog feed with a Facebook Page. Unfortunately, many of these RSS apps do not work as well as they are intended.
Social RSS, however, is one of the exceptions. Not only does this app work, it is also a “Verified App”, meaning that it has been reviewed and accepted by Facebook. The app allows you to display your RSS feed on the wall, boxes tab and on a customizable tab.
Squidoo
Squidoo’s premise is that everyone is an expert at something. It offers users a way to build a “lens” or topic of focus through publishing a page about that specific topic. If your strategy is to establish your company as an expert in a particular field, you can create a Squidoo lens and integrate your blog’s RSS feed into the lens (page).
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The tools I mentioned above are only a handful of things you can do with your blog’s RSS feed. Do you have any other suggestions on how someone can better leverage their RSS feed?
Tags: facebook, feedburner, friendfeed, rss, squidoo, Twitter
