"UnFriend" - Makes You Think....

The word of the 2009 was announced as “unfriend” in the Oxford American Dictionary http://tinyurl.com/yzy6dw5

I start to think about how many of us like to think that we’re highly organized and efficient when it comes to our social network, there is in fact a lot we can do to make our lives easier and faster.

I’ve adopted some radical measures to streamline and improve my use of Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and even my several Blogs.

1 – Cut the Number of People You Follow/Friend

The temptation when you first start using social networking’s its to embark on a ‘following rampage’. You add the sites you read, the bloggers you respect, friends, family, business colleagues and in return many of the people that follow wants you to follow them. This of course seems like a great idea at first, but you’ll find a tipping point – in my own case, by following close to 2000 people in Twitter alone, Social Networking has become nothing more than a never-ending deluge of noise, with useful and informative updates getting lost amongst the funny stuff. Even by setting up a aggregator on my desktop I am finding it ever harder to keep up and yet… addicting too.

I made the decision to cut back on who I accept, follow, friend. And It was time to ‘purge’.

Before hitting the unfollow or unfriend option in earnest, I realized it would be a wise idea to set myself some criteria for who I should keep in my network:

- Is this person I’m following/friending  bringing any real value to me?

- Is this person I’m following/friending  tweeting unique information and links?

- Does this person I’m following/friending me and if they do, do they ever communicate with me or re-tweet what I put out there? (GREAT DECISION MAKER FOR ME)

There is plenty of reasons of your own that you could add, but this is what suited me at the moment.

Next, I realized it takes me many hours to go through everyone using Twitter on its own. Thankfully there’s some great tools available to help you. I used Digsby (www.digsby.com)  this is what you get using this tool specifically.

When you log in to Digsby you automatically get logged into your numerous social networks (twitter, facebook, linkedin, etc) including your IM’s and emails. At this point… the plurge, start unfollowing or unfriending those in these locations.

2 – Effectively Manage the Remaining People You Follow/Friended

Once I’d got over what I’d done, it was time to effectively manage who I was left with.

This next step is very easy to undertake. Each application allows you to set up groups, whereby you can classify the people you follow/friended into distinct groups, such as ‘friends’, ‘colleagues’, ‘business’,  etc. In future when you get a new tweet/status update for someone you have allocated to a group it will appear in the appropriate group column. This way you can find and read it with less difficulty.

****Twitter now also allows you to set up lists as well, so you can group together people in a similar way.

3 – Be Prepared to Fall in Love with Social Media All over Again (don’t tell your significant other)

What I’ve described sound quite drastic, but trust me, if your social networks has become an out of control stream of status with mafia war that you can’t keep up with, it really is your only option… UNFRIEND/UNFOLLOW.

Since I made this choice to cut the number of people I follow/friended down to my comfort level of engagement, I’ve rediscovered my love for social medial.

Posted via email from Kay Kelison's Digital-Log