Social Media Burnout

As someone who works in social media 5 days a week and who spends a great deal of her free time doing things like blogging and participating in conversations on Twitter and Facebook for my clients, I'll be the first to tell you that, if you're not careful with social media, burnout will slap you upside the head.

For the last few months, I've been feeling this sense of complete disgust with all things social media - specifically Facebook - and my participation has dwindled. I blamed it on the job, noting that working in social media 10 hours a day has made it nearly impossible to enjoy participating on a personal level. In fact, I think I've even said a handful of times that I do everything I can to avoid Facebook when I'm not at work. Note: to some it's probably quite clear that I've taken the energy I used to put into these outlets and aimed it at my blogging, hence the wicked increase in posts here. Which, as I see it, isn't a bad thing either!

Recently, something seems to have changed. In the past few weeks, I've slowly started jumping into the conversation again. My posts on Twitter aren't just self-serving anymore, (read: promoting a recent blog post), I'm back to reaching out to others, seeking out information, actually reading the updates that come across Tweetdeck. Same with Facebook - I'm back in action when it comes to taking part in the conversations and posting information that isn't just rubbish about myself for the sake of posting.

All this got me to thinking about the purpose of social media. When I joined Facebook back in college, it was a tool for college kids to keep in touch with friends, link up with old friends and stalk potential new friends. ;) I kid.

But since the evolution of platforms like Facebook and Twitter, the purpose of daily participation has morphed a bit. As I see it, you get out of social media what you put into it. If you're an information seeker, you can only spend so much time as a voyeur before you have to sack up and share some of your resources with others. Utilizing Facebook and Twitter to share links to articles and blog posts that you find interesting, sharing photography and videos that helped you learn, that you think would be helpful to others.

There's an element of Karma in social media. If you're just there for yourself, you're likely not going to see it's full potential. But if you're willing to put in a bit of energy, you might be surprised what you get out of it.

So for all you bloggers out there who crave comments, be sure you're out there reading and providing genuine feedback to others on their blogs. Facebookers and Tweeters, if you haven't already, start joining the conversation to talk about more than yourself. You might be surprised at what happens.

Cheers!

-A