This is what I wound up repeating over and over again this week as I recommitted myself to my business. I do a lot of freelance writing. I also do direct sales and I am active in the gaming community as an event organizer and a forum moderator. I have a delayed toddler, legal troubles and more to do than one person can possibly handle. In short, I am a mom.
I have been neglecting the social media side of my business. When I went to organize it this week using Hoot Suite, I found that my poor little owl had so much to refresh every 5 minutes it was losing feathers from the stress.
So I started cleaning pages off my facebook and twitter feeds. I organized tabs on my hoot suite to break up the streams by page and social site.
At first I treated it like cleaning out my closet. "If I haven't interacted with this page in one year, I should probably unfollow it..."
My poor owl was still looking kinda tired. There are very few pages I interact with on a daily basis. So I got just one more app. This app was to unlike, unfollow and declutter my feeds.
When I do sit down to social network, even with the streamlining tools I have, wasting time reading 20 updates of memes isn't helping my business or schedule. It isn't making dinner and it sure isn't making me money.
Over the next few days I will be sure to do posts to "relike" all my personal friends pages and any pages I want to promote or use in my networking projects. I feel a little twinge of guilt for all the pages I like in a giveaway, I really do. And I didn't unlike the ones that always keep me really engaged with fun and useful posts, they stayed.
It was a reminder to me that I can use giveaways and networking to gain fans and customers, but I have to make an impression, stay involved, and provide a one of a kind experience to keep them.
