How many social media sites are you actively engaging on? By that, do you at least visit that site a few times a week? How many do you visit daily? How many do you visit several times a day?
For me, I put Facebook, LinkedIn, and more recently Pinterest and Twitter into the category of active engagement, as in I visit those sites daily, and sometimes more than once during the day.
So, those of you who live and breathe social media may be saying – big deal! Isn’t that what you are supposed to do?
Maybe that’s what the “experts” say, but I am the expert in my own life. And for me, adding social media in the mix of a life that was already pretty darn busy has truly become a balancing act.
I don’t bring this up much, but for this post it is appropriate that I tell you that yes, I still have a “day” job and one that I love. I work as an enrollment advisor for the College for Financial Planning in a suburb of Denver.
It is an intense 8-5 job, or sometimes 7-4 depending on the day of the week. Plus I live 16 miles from my office, so the commute ranges from 30-50 minutes depending on the time of day.
Then I am quite involved, some might say “addicted” to Toastmasters, and belong to three Toastmasters clubs and am helping a 4th one get started. That’s another approximately 15 hours a week for my favorite hobby, as I am keen on improving my speaking and leadership skills and helping others to do the same.
The reason I bring all these things up is that I believe that there are a number of other people out there like me – working a day job, launching a business, and active in a range of volunteer and service activities.
How does a person then find time to add social media into their day? Good question! It is one I ask myself regularly.
As with so many other things, the answer is “it depends.”
It depends on what you hope to gain from social media.
Maybe you use it strictly recreationally to keep up with the comings and goings of family and friends. Then perhaps your use could be more sporadic.
Maybe you use it to learn more about your professional field or an entirely new body of knowledge. Or maybe you use social media to learn more about how to use social media.
Then your use might become more regular, or at least targeted in terms of the times of day and/or days of the week when you are on social media.
This list could go on and on.
The bottom line for me is to strike a balance between my commitments to my employer, my husband, and others who count on me and my use of social media.
As much as I enjoy and benefit from social media, I don’t want to find myself becoming obsessed with it.
What are your experiences around weaving social media into the rest of your life?
Joyce Feustel, Founder of Boomers’ Social Media Tutor, helps people relatively new to social media to become more effective and comfortable in their use of this medium. Find her at www.boomerssocialmediatutor.com
When I started learning about social media back in 2009, my objective was just that: to learn about social media. I was spending about seven hours a day, six days a week on social media. I was even dreaming about it. That went on for about nine months. But, it wasn’t an obsession. It was part of my professional development strategy. It was, in fact, my full time job. Even though I wasn’t getting paid to do it, it was the calculated investment I knew I had to make if I wanted to continue being a communication consultant.
These days I spend about 20 minutes a day on on my social media. In addition to that, I spend about 20 minutes a day perusing the blogs in my RSS feed. (I use Google Reader to organize the blogs I think are worth following.) That’s 40 minutes a day, down from seven hours a day.
For me, it was a matter of a fairly steep learning curve because I wanted to know as much as possible about the full range of social media channels; and, I had a very specific objective, which was to learn about social media so I could understand how it would change business communication.
So, as you say in your blog post: “It depends on what you hope to gain from social media.” That’s exactly what I mean when I counsel my clients to identify their objective for using social media. Without that little bit of focus at the core of their strategy, they run the risk of getting swept up in noise and chaos, and yes, even addiction of social media . . . and that almost never ends well.
Debi
Debi, as you have before in other comments, you have so beautifully fleshed out the points I was attempting to make in my blog post. I feel like I am the play by play announcer and you are the color commentator as you provide these specific examples. 🙂
That is so heartening for me, still being more on the learning curve side, and as I wrote, hampered a bit by the “day job,” to know I will eventually get to a point where my time on social media diminishes. It already has for certain of the social media sites as I become more familiar with them and just learn how to use them more strategically.
Joyce – Your blog posts inspire me. Keep writing them and I’ll keep reading them. I’m doing some of my own research on what it takes to be engaging, and I’m using you as a model!
Debi, that makes my day!