Part of being an Anti-Social Media Expert is reading a lot of blog posts, tweets, feeds. It’s a never ending stream of media, and as I get more minions followers, it gets worse. So, how do I handle it?
I don’t read a lot.
I don’t have the brainpower or the energy to read everything. I prefer to write rather than read, and I prefer to try to live my life away from the computer. 90% of my tweets/writing/content come from my iPhone, while I’m doing something other than focusing on social media.
I plow through a lot of blog feeds on Google Reader. I’m becoming less and less of a fan of Google, aka Big Brother, but Reader is a perfect product because I can see all my feeds quickly, skip the less interesting ones, and save all the interesting ones for later. And when you write a social media blog, and have a life off of the internet (WHO KNEW?!), this creates a whole flood of interesting and relevant posts you can write about later.
The next thing I do is I pick my sites and stick with them. I’m big on Twitter, Facebook, and TriOut. I also exist on LinkedIn, Tumblr, Foursquare, and a bunch of other places, but I don’t try as hard on them because I don’t understand them, don’t use them the way they are intended, or I just don’t care for them. I can’t be everywhere physically, and I can’t be everywhere on the internet. I pick my battles on what works best for me, and try to do the best I can there.
For everything that I don’t have time to read right now that isn’t on Google Reader, I use Instapaper. This is mostly articles I come across on Twitter when I use my iPhone, so it’s not much, but I can read it quickly on my phone or when I get on my computer.
When all else fails, I unfollow. If the lack of information is truly apparently, I can always come crawling back and refollow. It’s not pretty to come back to a source after dropping it, but my humility allows me to recognize where I get content, versus all the crap that wastes my time.
