Managing Social Media’s Information Overload

November 10, 2010

Social Media Overload

“There is just too much information!”

We’ve all said it: even long-time marketers like me who are online most of the time. There is just so much information out there online and in social media that it can be tough to get through the day. Sometimes you may feel overwhelmed, other times you may be worried that you’ve missed something important. It’s a struggle.

Luckily solutions are available. There are tools and practices that can help mitigate the constant bombardment and sooth the stress of information overload. Let’s take a look at some of the top ways to manage the insanity.

Email
Twitter
Facebook

Email: I don’t know about you, but my inbox seems to be chock-a-block-full of emails that although interesting, don’t rate high on my daily must read list. So, I went rogue and purged. I edited it down to only the essentials. I unsubscribed from the somewhat interesting lists and left only the cream of the crop subscriptions – the ones that brought me useful information on my industry, markets and trends.

Then I set up an RSS Feed Reader. Most major search engines and software platforms have them, and even some other smaller players too. Wikipedia posts a comparison of them. I chose Google Reader since I already had a Google account and was actively using some of their other features.

Wherever I could, I unsubscribed from email lists (from the good ones that were left over after the initial purge) and I added the actual blog subscription to my RSS Feed Reader instead.

The result? No more overflowing inbox, I just open my Reader and browse the headlines at my convenience. It’s a way better system. Now it’s like I have a personal newspaper at my disposal instead of getting buried in a mail bag of letters.

Twitter: As a Twitterholic, this is a tough one, but I do agree that it’s downright impossible to stay current with all the Tweet streams and conversations on Twitter without tools.

I’ve found that to get the most from Twitter, I had to step away from Twitter, or at least Twitter’s application that is. Most heavy users of Twitter manage their interests with multi-tasking tools like TweetDeck or HootSuite. These let you manage your stream by lumping followers into groups so you can more easily ‘listen’ to those you want to hear.

It’s kind of like mingling at a cocktail party. You can’t possibly listen to everyone at once, so you pay attention to those you’re most interested in and engage in conversation with them. It doesn’t totally exclude all other party-goers, you can always eves-drop on other conversations, but it does reduce some of the static noise.

Facebook: People either love Facebook for its super highway of connectedness or hate it for its seeming disregard for personal privacy. One thing that perhaps both sides can agree on though, is that it’s a big part of the Social Media scene.

Probably the best feature for managing information overload here is to create lists of friends. Every time you add a “friend” you can identify what list they belong to; childhood friends, best friends, work friends. You get the idea.

The lists feature comes in handy to manage the overload. You can now sort the wall posts by types of friends, instead of getting overwhelmed with everyone’s posts. If you’re at work, and you want to see what your work colleagues are up to, simply click on the “friends” button on the left hand side, just under your profile picture and select “work friends”. Only your friends tagged as “work friends” will appear in your post stream. This lets you listen in where you want, and ignore the rest.

So even though there is a lot information out there, there are ways to successfully manage social media and online communications to make it all worth the connectivity. And with the whole world moving online, it is definitely worth staying connected.

Marketing, Technology, social media | Diane Vautier | 4:59 pm

5 Comments

By Sandy G, November 12, 2010 @ 2:05 am

Hey Diane, Nice Post on Information Overload. There are lots of excellent tools which help you tackle information overload. Taroby.com is one such product which helped me manage all my stuff like emails, IMs, voice mails, snail mails etc… It acts as your online personal assistant. Do check it out
By Andy Moles, November 12, 2010 @ 2:07 am

Great Post! One of our partners is working on development of a really cool product called unifiedinbox.com which helps the users manage communication & Social Media Overload effectively.
By Tushneem Dharmagadda, November 18, 2010 @ 4:07 pm

Good post. I wrote a post on Real-Time v/s On-Demand a while back – my take on Web 3.0 – Might be of interest to you – http://wp.me/pw0hs-53
By Diane Vautier, November 23, 2010 @ 12:10 pm

Thanks all for the comments. As info overload continues to grow, I’m sure there will be lots of tools to combat it. This of course, is just the first line of (free) defense that can help.