Presentation from the second Liverpool Social Media Café.
"Ever find yourself struggling to cope with too much information on the superinterwebs? Find out how to tame the social media beast with Michael’s top tips for handling social media overload!"
1. Handling Social Media Overload Michael Nolan http://twitter.com/MikeNolan/ | http://blogs.edgehill.ac.uk/webservices/ | http://www.michaelnolan.co.uk/
Firstly I am not a social media expert. I was originally a web applications developer then I played at being a project manager and now I’m “Head of Web Services” which means attending meetings. As an aside I’ve been looking for an excuse to use other illustrations from this book so here’s a few people you might recognise
If you came here expecting to see Batman, you’re a couple of weeks late and I’m the wrong Nolan brother.
So this talk could have been called Michael’s Top Tips for managing your social media activity.
And it’s actually about some of the things I do to keep me sane. You may
RSS or Atom feeds are just a tool and it’s important to understand how to use them and where they are useful.
I’ve been a fan of Google Reader for many years – it’s web based but has a mobile version and support for synching with mobile and desktop apps.
Twitter.com isn't perfect. Despite their best efforts to "fill holes" in the product there are still many things that the website doesn't do on its own. Fortunately for the power user there are many third party clients available so find one that you like.
HootSuite has quite a lot of fans. Personally I’ve always been put off it by the awful ht.ly tracking bar it adds to links but recently I’ve started playing with it a bit more and I like some of its features.
But for companies wanting to track customer engagement, CoTweet is excellent. It’s designed for exactly that purpose and you’ll see it being used by some very big companies like BT, Vodafone, O2
BothHootSuite and CoTweet have a nice little feature for adding the user after a carat symbol which can help make corporate accounts feel more personal
Whatever tools you use you’ll want to manage disruption. For example TweetDeck by default has these annoying notifications – I don’t know how anyone can get any work done with these popping up.
On a similar note Twitter itself can send notification emails whenever someone starts following you. These are annoying and relatively useless.
They are considerably more useful then 3 years ago...
But very quickly they can clog up your inbox. At the start of last year when Twitter went big, many so-called celebrities fell foul and ended up with hundreds of emails flooding in.
But it is very useful to know who’s following you so I recommend a service called rssfriends.com
Who’s used Twitter Search before?
Sometimes Twitter Search isn’t enough – it only goes back about a week and while you could add the feed to Google Reader to archive it, that’s not ideal. So archiving important topics for future reference is a good idea and this service k
The interface isn’t exactly pretty but it does what it says and allows you to export archives in a variety of formats.
A service which makes use of the TwapperKeeper API is quite nice – Summarizr from EduServ gives you some nice at-a-glance stats for any archive.
Facebook is often considered to be something of a walled garden but there are a surprising number of feeds available if you go looking. You can subscribe to RSS feeds for status updates, notifications, links and notes so you don’t need to constantly log into Facebook to check.
TwitterFeed can be used to automate posting from blogs, news entries, events and so on. This can be a very easy way to ensure you have regular postings but it does lose the personal touch. Better to mix automated with manual postings.
Closely related to automating. Crosspost Facebook messages to Twitter or vice versa
But be careful not to lose track of the conversation – it can be very easy to ignore once channel and styles can be very different.
Once something you’re doing is working, spread the workload. At Edge Hill we started off with Twitter and Facebook accounts being updated by TwitterFeed and occasionally by myself and our Director of Marketing both enthusiastic early adopters. When it became apparent that this was no longer a fad more of the responsibility was taken on by colleagues in Corporate Communications.
It’s also important to ensure you have a wide enough skill base – nobody is an expert at everything so if you’re part of a marketing or comms team, involve your web or IT department. Likewise hardcore geeks like me have a lot to learn about marketing!