How To Overcome Social Media Addiction

Social media is really a great way to connect online, build relationships and close deals. However spending the whole day on social media doesn’t make business sense at all. Today we all tend to justify the time spent on social media as a business activity just to salve our conscience. Could be right to those who engage wisely or are paid to tweet or post however spending too much time on social media could only mean that you aren’t doing a few other important things you’re supposed to be doing. Could be studying, working, going to church or just focusing or concentrating fully on a simple task that requires your attention.  

To put a few activities into perspective let’s check in on our social media and digital activities for signs of addiction and obsession by asking some pertinent questions.

According to Jeff Bullas.com if you have the following symptoms then you are addicted to social media

1. When you leave your iPhone behind at home do you feel a sense of loss and isolation because you can’t check your Facebook or Twitter updates while out and about.
2. You can check your Facebook account 20 times a day.
3. If you don’t receive a comment on your latest blog post within 12 hours you have suicidal thoughts!
4. You go away for a weekend without your laptop and you suffer severe heart palpitations?
5. You have more social media icons on you iPhone than productivity apps?
6. You have more online friends than you have in real life!
7. You Tweet on your mobile while walking!
8. You reply to tweets or posts before checking your smses or returning missed calls?
9. You log on to Facebook before you have brushed your teeth in the morning.
10. You check your Facebook or Twitter updates ‘after’ going to bed.

Let’s face it; social media is here to stay, some of us make a living out of this new emerging industry while to others social media could cost them big time. To the HR social media poses a challenge, it’s reducing the productivity and efficiency of their staff! Employees are happily spending huge amounts of their day on social media while working. Could be on the desktop or on phone; we’ve got social media with us in our pockets. This could mean having no real life to you or to others simply not doing anything without facebook or Twitter. Just how do we ensure this addiction is well taken care of? How do we control the urge? How do we ensure our employees do not waste valuable company time freely chatting online?

Here are a few tips that will help you manage your time better.

  1.     Schedule social media time

Social media power users don’t spend all their time online. In fact, they’ve created a schedule based upon their routine. Maybe you tweet in the morning, at lunch, during breaks and in the evenings. Use a timer to keep you from spending all of your time on social media. Having a schedule ensures you stick to it, you may also have your colleagues, spouse or friends to check on you to ensure you stick to the schedule as accountability partners. It may be tough to manage at the beginning but in a world where everyone has 24 hours in a day to make it or break it in life its worth trying out.

  2.     Automate Part of Your Presence

The tools discussed below will help you spend less time on social media. If used well these tools could make you more efficient and boost your productivity.

• Buffer – If you tend to do all your tweeting in bursts, you probably are losing some traffic. Use Buffer and you’ll have a more balanced tweeting schedule throughout the day. The best thing about this tool is you never have to spend hours on Twitter, just post and buffer all the tweets you want to share that particular day, indicate the time you want the tool to post and you’re done!
• Tweepi – If you’ve got a Twitter account where you are following too many people and want to clean up the mess, then Tweepi can help you. It flushes the unfollowers, cleans up the inactives and nudges you to follow new users. The beauty of this tool is that it helps you save time on ‘following back’ tweeps!
• TweetDeck – This free app is probably the best Twitter app across any platform—iPad, iPhone, Mac, or PC. But what makes it really stand out is it allows you to swipe between columns…speeding up access to DMs, replies, lists and search lists.
• Echofon Pro – This is a great app for the iPhone and it is equally great for the iPad, providing everything that makes an app great, plus a feature that allows you to respond to multiple tweets with one reply (That could save you quite sometime especially when responding to similar question eg where your office, event or dealer locations) Whether that’s worth $4.99, you’ll have to decide.

    3.     Split time with social sites

One thing about using social sites like Twitter is that you don’t get to take the content. A smart social media user recognizes this, and so doesn’t invest all of his social capital on one platform, but other sites as well. How does this help reduce addiction? Depending on how old you are LinkedIn might be boring to you, Twitter could be annoying if you’ve followed 1000 people and you only have 100 followers so most social media users spend a lot of time on Facebook doing nothing much! If you’re addicted to Facebook, get into Twitter, in the first few days you’ll it rather annoying but it helps you reduce on the urge to go back to Facebook.

4. Just don’t do it.

Social media addiction like other sorts of addictions are hard to leave but if you try hard enough you can overcome the urge to spend the whole day on social media. How? What I did with my addiction is I sold of my Android phone and replaced it with a Nokia 1110! That way I could only access net on a laptop! That cut half the time I spent on social media, with my laptop only I have managed to manage my addiction. When it comes to Friday at 4pm I do not touch it till Monday or spend more than an hour on it. When I did this for two months I managed to ‘cure’ my addiction to social media. Today I finish my tasks on time, I am more efficient and I live a normal life! Can that help you? How have you managed to handle your addiction?Let's have a chat on Twitter, leave your comments on my handle @KenyanMarketer