Ah, a new year. A time to go out with the old and in with the new. Many people use this time to get rid of junk that’s been sitting in the garage/attic/basement since before Netscape has its IPO. (August 9, 1995) But what about cleaning up the junk that’s sitting in your social media feeds?
Whether it’s blog feeds going into your favorite RSS reader (I’m a fan of Google Reader, myself), the number of friends you have on Facebook, the number of people you’re following on Twitter, or your connections on LinkedIn, you probably volunteered to receive a lot more crap in 2009. Technology has made it so easy to say “Yes, please!” to so many different sources of information that the end result can be information overload.
Just imagine if you could sign up, freely, to have every single magazine still being published delivered to your home/office/loft/van down by the river… How many would you actually end up reading? And would you read less than you would if you only received what you were actually interested in?
If you are one of those people who are trying to follow every single person on Twitter, then this post probably isn’t for you. Enjoy trying to read the entire Internet in 2010 and we’ll tell your friends and family that you love them. But if you cringe every time you open your inbox or your Twitter feed is being updated quicker than you can read it, here are some tips to help you simply your social media lifestyle:
- Unsubscribe from e-mail lists. In the late 90s, clicking “Unsubscribe” from an e-mail was almost a certain way of ensuring you’d receive more spam. ”Hey, there’s an actual human being at the other end of this e-mail address! Send them more Viagra ads!” But these days, unsubscribe often means just that.And I’m not talking about spam here — I’m talking about that blog that you thought was so interesting back in February that signing up for their e-mail newsletter just seemed like the right thing to do. If you find yourself deleting e-mails from mailing lists you’re on before you even open the e-mail, you probably shouldn’t be subscribed to it. Take the time (yes, right now) to go through your inbox, find everything you’re not interested in, scroll down to the bottom of the e-mail and “Unsubscribe”. Your future self will thank you.
- You really don’t care what the 245,343 people you’re following are saying on Twitter. I know, you were just trying to be polite. Someone started following you on Twitter and some lesson about manners that your mom taught you when you were six-years-old just made you automatically follow this person back.
But now your Twitter feed is filled with people talking about Hannah Montana, hashtag topics you don’t even understand and more spam than a Monty Python song. (yes, it’s okay to chuckle. That was pretty witty of me…)It was surprisingly difficult for me to find tools to help clean out the list of people I follow on Twitter. I found a lot that can automatically unfollow people that aren’t following you, but I don’t expect many of the people/news sources I follow to follow me back.TwitBlock is a great tool for looking at your followers, determining which ones are probably spammers or bots and blocking them, but I want a similar tool for people I follow, not my followers. If anyone has any suggestions, please post a comment below.
- Are you really friends with all those people on Facebook? It’s time to decide who your true friends are. Log in to Facebook, under the “Friends” menu at the top, select “All Friends” and start x’ing people you don’t really care about. They’re not going to be notified so you don’t even have to prepare an awkward “It’s not you, it’s me,” speech. That is, until Facebook pops up your picture as a Suggested Friend and your ex-friend now has to say to himself, “Wait, we’re already friends…. oh.”
- Do you trust all your connections on LinkedIn? The whole point of LinkedIn is sharing your business connections. It’s very annoying when you think one of your connections knows someone at a company you’re trying to connect with, but when you ask your connection, he says, “Oh, I don’t really know Jim. I just found his business card lying on the ground, ran home, and quickly added him to my network on LinkedIn.”If you wouldn’t recommend so-and-so to someone, you shouldn’t be connected to them. It’s not a competition. Connecting to anyone and everyone through LinkedIn defeats the purpose of the site.
- Does it take you all day to go through your RSS feeds? If so, maybe you should get rid of some of them. Now I know some of you are saying, “But, Jeremy, I don’t expect to read ALL of my RSS feeds. I just want them there when I need them.” Fine. But are there any feeds you’re subscribed to that you NEVER read?
Google Reader has a great feature called “Trends” that you can use to see what you’re reading and what you aren’t. If you’ve been subscribed to a blog for six months that sends out one post a day and you haven’t read any of them, it’s time to cut the cord.
If you can get rid of some of the noise that’s so easy to find online, you’ll be able to do a better job of focusing on the things you really want to be focusing on and have a more enjoyable 2010.
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