Finding the time to keep up with social media

Posted by Cory Bergman on January 3, 2011

The most difficult job for anyone who works in social media these days is prioritizing your time in a space that feels like it’s moving faster than the speed of light. If you work in television, you’re likely running solo on social media, and your schedule is already packed full of Facebook, Twitter and (maybe) YouTube. But now there’s Quora, Instagram, Reddit is blowing up and Tumblr keeps taunting you.

It almost makes you want to never look at Mashable or TechCrunch ever again. How does anyone find time for it all?

Mashable ran a story this week about NPR’s experiment with Instagram, the iPhone app that lets users snap, edit, curate and share photos. NPR social guy Andy Carvin, responding to a tweet about how he finds time for it, says he spends 2 minutes to post a photo. “Don’t tell me you don’t have 2 mins,” he tweets. “Today I’ve posted on Instagram on the train, booting my PC and eating a tuna sandwich. Not exactly time lost.”

Dedicating a small part of your day to experiment with emerging social services is a great use of time. At the very least, give it a quick spin and reserve your branded account names before someone grabs them — remember Twitter?

The harder question comes later. At what point do you double down on an experiment, or pull the plug? Tumblr fits this category. “Every time I try to get on the Tumblr bandwagon, my interest usually putters out after a day or two as I go back to my own blog, Twitter or Facebook,” writes NY Times’ Nick Bilton, who is giving Tumblr another try. Quite a few media companies are giving Tumblr a spin, even Seattle TV station KING 5.

In the end, it’s about meeting your social media goals. Is it referrals? TV promotion? Story tips? Programming ideas? Combining these goals with actual metrics (when available) will help focus your efforts. Don’t shy away from hard decisions to abandon unworthy experiments, but always experiment.

I’ll leave you with my latest experiment. Quora has exploded after Robert Scoble praised the new social answer service last week. Basically, you can post questions and answers, follow other people to see their answers, and follow topics that interest you. Some rather prominent people (mostly in the technology world so far) are posting answers to good questions, which TechCrunch says it’s using as a source of story ideas. In a way, it’s a great place to prove your expertise.

Certainly worth a small experiment, and I think the jury is still out on how it fits into the social picture. In the meantime, I think I’ll log off for the day, put down my iPhone and pick up an old-fashioned book. Tomorrow’s barrage of Mashable headlines will come soon enough.

Filed Under Instagram, Quora, Tumblr

The Unknown Known

I have to sell some spare stereo gear and repair the Altec Model Three based speakers I took out with the right channel of a Sansui G-5700 when I got tired or the cops not being able to get to gangsters out across the street after 6 hours and opened the mike for Carpenters and classic country karaoke last summer.

Chris LeDoux singing about Copenhagen did the trick but I lost have of a classic K-tel 8-track set in the process.

No more thugs!

Anti-social works. Michael Arrington is bizarre anyway. Always reminded me of that Tubes Classic, “White Punks On Dope” when I’d read TC. Let’s go to Denny’s.
http://twitter.com/davinci076 tunci

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tplanchet

I think the main goal, at some point, is that whatever is generated through social media at some point needs to pay some dollars to keep the investment and experimentation going. I know it’s a practical point some don’t like to address on here, but in order to keep fueling the newest upgrades and developments there has to be some cash. Yes, I know that a very, very small handful of new ideas (Groupon for instance) has shown up big, but a majority of them aren’t big or don’t generate dollars.
http://wideaperture.net/blog/ Josh Braun

Having spent some time now picking the brains of folks involved with social media at the different networks, it seems to me the goals of their experimentation can roughly be divided into three categories: (1) reaching (new) audiences where they prefer to be, whether that’s Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr or whatever, (2) spreading one’s distribution and marketing bets across many platforms, because you can’t know which number’s going to hit, and (3) using each platform in accordance with its strengths to tell the best stories you can.

The difficulty, as it appears to me, is that each of these goals calls for different social media strategies, yet they’re all in play simultaneously. And, as Cory points out, it’s often the same person responsible for chasing all three targets (or in some cases, multiple people who one can only hope pay sufficient attention to one another’s activities). Call me a pessimist, but I don’t think social media can do everything, or at least not everything simultaneously. At some point using these platforms wisely probably calls for deciding on which goals you want to optimize for, with the understanding that in building for them, you’ll inevitably have to neglect—or at times even build against—the others.
http://wideaperture.net/blog/ Josh Braun

In retrospect, add to that list of goals a fourth, which is reaching out to existing core audiences and making them feel more involved. I know that’s a big part of the show for a lot of folks.
http://lostremote.com/ Safran

Excellent points. Thanks for sharing your ideas.
http://wideaperture.net/blog/ Josh Braun

Likewise, thanks for a great post.
The Unknown Known

I’m still not using this stuff on a Schwinn.
The Unknown Known

I’m still not using this stuff on a Schwinn.
The Unknown Known

I’m still not using this stuff on a Schwinn.
http://www.PNWLocalNews.com/ paulbalcerak

“In the end, it’s about meeting your social media goals,” is really the whole argument.

I’ve played around with just about every social platform, but right now only a couple of them (guess which two) are so useful that I can justify their regular use.
http://www.onlinegamestown.com/word-games.html word games

This people are really addicted to social media and it is really hard for them to find time just to open up net or network channel coz of there job