Social Media Fatigue

It is human nature to lose interest or become annoyed with things with repeated exposure.  Do you ever count the number of social media updates, prompts, and reminders that you receive?  What about the time that you spend?  Too much social media can result in social media fatigue.  Social media fatigue is a condition in which you are bored with incoming messages, tired of the tedium of continuous updates, and feeling like screaming if you see another “say happy birthday” notice for someone you really don’t know. Before you toss your phone through the window, follow these tips for overcoming social media fatigue.

1.) Control the Flow of Info

Change your settings, so you get one summary message daily or weekly, depending upon your preference.  Control the information that is fed to you. You can discontinue the broadcast messages each time one of your connections updates their profile page.  You also have the power to discontinue receiving prompts to endorse people.  Take the time to go through the settings on your LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook accounts.  Decide the type of information you want to see and how frequently you want to receive it.

2.) Scrutinize Your Connections

If you have a connection that tends to over-share, it may be time to cut them from your list.  Also, remove annoying marketers from your list.  You know the ones.  You accept their invitation and within 24 hours you are receiving spam messages from them about whatever product or service they are marketing. Also, take advantage of settings options to discontinue posts or messages from designated connections.  If the over-sharing connection is a valued contact, consider keeping them around but decreasing the flow of info fed to you.

3.) Choose Your Time to Interact

Use your down time to check into your social media world.  Use the five-minute bits of time sprinkled through the day while you are waiting for a meeting or phone call to update your followers and connections, as well as post replies to others.  If you are not taking away from what could be productive time, you may feel less drained by social media activities.  Also, when you allocate time that is just before a scheduled meeting or event, you are less likely to be drawn into an hour of surfing.  Who is not guilty of spending an hour or more on Facebook when our initial intention was just to post a quick update?

4.) Get off the Grid

Yes, it is healthy to get off the grid every once in a while.  A time when you are not tied to the phone, and following feeds from multiple social media could be the break you need to fight social media fatigue.  

The Bottom Line

As a big champion of social media, I encourage you to leverage social media to support your career goals.  Beyond job searching, it is a smart way to network and stay on top of industry news.  However, you can get too much of a good thing and begin to feel fatigued.   Follow the above tips to optimize your social media involvement and avoid the fatigue.  If you would like help creating a social media strategy for your job search, contact me.