Hands up if you’re sick of social media!
Hands up if you love it so much, you have to log in every day, at least six times!
It may be unoffical, but those love-hate symptons are signs of social media sickness.
To sum up the two extreme sicknesses:
- Socially Depressed (Hate)
- Obsessive Social Behaviour (Love)
Socially depressed
Social media are here to stay say the big wigs at Google, Facebook and Twitter. You’ve been using it quite some time and toyed with it for personal and business use. You’ve made some friends, learnt the basics, chatted to the cyber world with sometimes some, and sometimes zero response.
Day in, day out – Good morning, here’s a post, thanks. Comment. Day done.
And over time all the monotomous tasks take their toll. Some days you try and inject some forced good humour, other days you couldn’t give a fig. You drag your digital heels, share less, half-heartedly talk, go through the motions of activity with the zest of dog crap. You’ve lost that social feeling. You’re socially depressed.
Here’s a step by step to ease that social depression:
Step 1
Take yourself away from the pc/mobile and go somewhere. Look around you and be inspired by the natural beauty of the world around you. You need time to re-awaken your senses and time out to relax.
Step 2
When you are feeling more relaxed. Do a browsing exercise. Just look radomly at other social media pages. Note the ones which you like. Do this for 30 mins max, then walk away.
Step 3
Start a plan for the next three months. Have a space for each week and one to cover each month. Now look back at your list of pages – the ones you liked. Note the things that you liked about them – the questions, tone, designs, ideas and consider how you could use smililar ideas to liven up your page. Write under the ‘month’ area your ideas.
Step 4
Chat to someone in the know about how to implement these ideas. Facebook especially has strict rules, so it’s best to speak to someone who knows these rules before you jump in. You could dicuss competitions, customisation, questions, polls, crowdsourcing, videos etc.
In a previous post, I discussed The Ten Tell Tale Signs of Social Burnout which has a few ideas on bringing back momentum and originality.
You may have been mighty intriged when the word got out about Facebook and Twitter. Either that, or you avoided it like the plague….only to get pulled in when your curiousity took over. You signed up to that baby and in no time you were inventing any conversation under the sun to get social.
One platform addiction was enough to catch the bug and you quickly signed up to a few more sites. How could you resist that cute Twitter birdie or a totally new set of people to win over. When a whisper came through on Facebook about Google+, you didn’t hesitate. It was sweet music to your ears.
It’s a balancing act and the only way to keep the conversation going…is to keep the conversation going. Gone are the days of quiet family meals, watching TV with the partner or enjoying the sun set. You have fans and friends internationally and they never sleep. Well, not when you do. You keep your phone handy to natter right through to bedtime.
I said you caught the bug. You did indeed – the Obsession social behaviour bug!
Here’s a step by step to tame that Obsessive social behaviour:
Step 1
Plan your activity so you have a schedule with goals. Vary your activities, but keep them light. Have a slightly different plan per platform and stick to it!
Step 2
Limit your activity on all platforms overall and set times for accessing your accounts and responding. Moderation is key for you. There’s no need to keep a 24/7 watch.
Step 3
Use lists to interact with updates by others. It’s a good idea to tap into work stuff in the week and leisure stuff at the weekend. Also saves you looking at everything in one go.
Step 4
Lastly, enlist some help. If social media is taking over and you are losing time on other important tasks – hire someone to take this on for you.
Do you fall under either of these extreme social media sicknesses? How do you avoid them?
“Image from Vbar /Shutterstock.”
