Suffering from Social Networking Overwhelm?

A participant in my Facebook Fortunes class recently posed this challenge to me:

“Hi Mari,

My name is Sara and I am a newbie 🙂

I just sent you a message from Facebook too. In fact that’s part of my question. I’m on Plaxo, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, MSN Messenger, Gmail, Gmail Chat, MySpace, have three Outlook email boxes, a David Allen task manager, Google reader, Blogger blog, and now the Podclass. Is there any way I can consolidate all these (and different usernames and passwords)?

I’m 32 and am certainly not on even half as many sites whatever the kids are into. How does everybody get time to go into all their sites… and remember to?!!

Many thanks,
Sara”

Does this situation sound familiar? I’m sure many of us can relate to Sara’s challenge!

As an increasing number of web tools, services, platforms, widgets, and gizmos flood the internet and tempt us, this type of situation will only become more complex and difficult to manage.

Is there an easy solution to social networking overwhelm? I’m not sure.

Here’s my response to Sara:

“Hi Sara,

I believe it’s a challenge that many people online today face. I know I do.

We only have a limited number of hours in the day – time is the great equalizer. So, as marketers, we’re faced with the conundrum of “attention marketing.” Equally, as users of all these interfaces, we need to experiment and find where our market hangs out most and where to invest most of our time.

Are you familiar with the 80:20 principle? A guy by the name of Pareto discovered that this applies to pretty much everything in life. If you look in your closet, you probably wear 20% of your clothes 80% of the time. 80% of your income comes from 20% of your clients.

I really enjoyed the book The Four Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferriss. He severely limits his time online … and is still wildly successful.

So, bottom line, it really just depends on the individual. We each need to choose the top 20% of platforms that provide the 80% of results we want and ignore the rest.

Hope these ideas help.
Cheers,
Mari”

The key is to have a strategy – what’s yours?

BTW, I just checked the My Links app I have on my Facebook profile:

If I add in Facebook, Gmail, and Outlook too, that makes 10 platforms. But I only use TWO every single day, several times a day: Facebook and Twitter. Indeed, 20%. AND, I’m monitoring my results. I’ll keep you posted!

Mari Smith

Often referred to as “the Queen of Facebook,” Mari Smith is widely known as the Premier Facebook Marketing Expert and a top Social Media Thought Leader. Forbes describes Mari as, “… the preeminent Facebook expert. Even Facebook asks for her help.” IBM named Mari as one of seven women that are shaping digital marketing. Mari is an in-demand keynote speaker, corporate social media strategist, dynamic live webcast host, and popular brand ambassador. She is coauthor of Facebook Marketing: An Hour A Day, and author of The New Relationship Marketing.

More Posts - Twitter - Facebook - LinkedIn