Even if I use automatic systems, I’m facing the big dilemma on how can I efficiently follow more than 6,600 people online: it seems impossible, but it’s not.
I “physically” entered the social networks exactly one year ago.
I already had a few profiles on some of them, but on Oct. 6th 2008 I started managing 13 profiles on 13 social platforms (you can see an almost complete list at http://mario.soavi.com).
After a couple of months I concentrated on three of them (Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn), which are now “my social presence” on the web.
All my “social activity” (I brought here a lot of the email activity I was doing) let me have now more than 6,600 net contacts on social networks.
Now, that’s a problem.
If you don’t consider the contact list as a popularity index (which is not) and you wish to have a “real” social activity, so many contacts are a big problem.
In fact, taking into considerations the statistics at “The Inside Numbers on Twitter“, following 6,600 people means reading an average of 2,442 messages per day, which are (if we make it simple and imagine they are only 140-character tweets) nearly 228 pages of unorganized, time-scattered and often uninteresting texts.
Well, obviously any platform has its characteristics and I use those three as I have three different goals to perceive.
And that’s the main clue one should use: find your goal, focus your activity, gather your consequences, rate the content, read the most relevant based on a semantic screening of all (well, the latest is rather an exclusive way I use).
But one cannot just sit back and read; s/he has to originally contribute to the information flow, trying to share knowledge.
So here come all the redemption data one could retrieve from the networks (RTs on Twitter and comments on Facebook and page views on LinkedIn) which, put together, will allow to understand if one is “in” or “out” the flow and if one’s original contribution is valuable or not.
Simple?
Time consuming, but very effective.
What to know more?
Ask me