As some of you may have heard, I had a rather up close and personal encounter with vertigo this week. It is hard to describe that sensation if you’ve never had it – walking across a floor that you feel is slanting towards the side is only fun at an amusement park. However, at moments when my sinuses and inner ear are behaving themselves, I have a new and greater appreciation for something very simple – walking around without feeling dizzy.
Balance is something we take for granted in our everyday lives, but in the online world, balance is something we are always striving for. At a recent #tweetdiner chat about getting started on Twitter, the word balance came up a lot, not as something that is enjoyed but rather as something that is greatly desired. This is an important point for online engagement, so I thought we could talk today a bit about the different kinds of balance one can strive for on social media platforms. Ready?
Balance Followers and People  You Follow: This is something Twitter will “help” you with, as in, if you follow too many people without people following you back, you aren’t able to follow more people. How can you avoid that kind of problem? Everyone seems to find their own way around that problem. From the time I first started tweeting, I have always hand-picked (manually) people I follow or follow back. This helps me make sure I’m not following back a lot of spam bots, and it also helps me know that the people I’m seeing in my Twitter stream are people I thought I’d take a chance on for some reason.
Balance in this regard means something different to everyone too, it seems. Balance for some people means following very few people and being very choosy about those few you do follow. For other folks, balance is letting an automated program control everything for you. What is your follower/follow balance?
Balance your time: This is something you hear about a lot in the online world. On which platform should you spend the most time? Should you spend more time reading, writing, or commenting? Is LinkedIn more important than Twitter? And what about that whole “rest of your life” thing?
Balance your attention: One of the biggest fears that comes up when people talk about online engagement is, “What if I lose touch with the people I really care about?” Scaling online is a huge issue, as a visit to any blog site or Twitter account will likely tell you. You can lose your balance just by talking to the same people over and over again, but you can also lose your balance by talking only to brand new people. How can you make sure that you keep in touch with your friends while also incorporating new people? How can you make sure you don’t become a hermit or a clique-maker?
Balance your reactions: This can be very hard to do online. With the pressure on to react lickety split, we sometimes put a reaction out there that we wish we could pull back right away. People will seldom see your tweet or your blog post in the full context that exists between your own two ears. That means if you are jubilant or full of angst, people won’t necessarily be able to take the full ride with you. Balance is the name of the game, not just to preserve your online reputation but also to invite others to engage with you.
How does balance play into your online existence? What advice do you have to offer on keeping things balanced as you sit in front of that computer screen (or iPad screen…or whatever else you might use)? I’d love to talk to you about it!
This is post #78 in the Engagement Series. Please feel free to hit subscribe, because if everyone does, I can stop asking! 🙂
Image by michael lorenzo. http://www.sxc.hu/profile/nazreth
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GrandmaOnDeck says
June 29, 2011 at 7:35 pmBalance is so important on twiiter. You have to understand what the balance should be for you and work it out.
First of all, I will not folllow anyone who does not have a profile.I started checking out something about those who are in my stream. I did find a few trying to sneak in some pornography spam. Then I hit a solid wall when I wanted to follow someone and couldn’t because twitter had put a ration restriction on me. Then I went back to my follower list and start to unfollow those with no profiles etc and eliminated those. From there I checked and started deleting thos that only send tweets to sell something and no messages of substance. The only automation I would consider is to have an application that showed me my twitter traffic.
Of course, alot your time on twitter. Send notes of gratitude and thanks, send messages I wish to express my
thoughts. Plan a certain amount of time to promote others and read a certain amount of blogs. Fit twitter in your daily schedule and stay on schedule.
Margie Clayman says
June 30, 2011 at 2:53 pmThat’s all such great advice, Gloria. Thanks a bunch!!! 🙂
Charlene Kingston (@SocialMediaDIY) says
June 30, 2011 at 7:43 amIt’s a great set of questions, Margie, with difficult answers, as you say.
I have a priority hot list that I run through when I come up for air from my production and client work to use social media. Email, Twitter (DMs, mentions, then streams), Facebook (page, personal) is my routine. How much time I spend on each depends on how much time I have (usually 5+ minutes 4-6 times a day) and what I encounter. Of course, by checking email first, I already know about some of the important things waiting for me.
I have different follow policies on my two Twitter accounts. For my business account, I follow back real businesses (I also completed profiles as the first screen) unless they sound sales pitchy or spammy in their bio. Or if I can’t figure out what they do, I pass. I probably follow 60%. Then, I also follow anyone who retweets me or mentions me. I figure that if they are going to trouble to talk to me, I want to make it easy for them to stay in touch.
I go through Twitter about once a month to weed out people who haven’t tweeted in more than 30 days. I figure it’s a slot that an active account could have in my timeline.
But reactions are a bit more challenging. I’ve caught myself enough times that I now wait to respond if something hooks into me. In fact, I might not respond to it until my next social media run, which could be 2 hours later. I try to use the rule of improv comedy (yes, and…) in all of my responses. I try to find a way to acknowledge people’s opinions and then add value. It’s hard sometimes. One time, all I could figure out to say was “thanks for sharing your opinion and adding your voice to the dialog” because in my head, I was thinking (loudly) “what kind of a bonehead thing is that to say?” I figure I have a chance to turn a challenge around. I tell business owners not to go ballistic over Yelp reviews, so I so my best to walk my own talk.
Sorry to hear about your vertigo, and glad that you are back on level ground again.
Margie Clayman says
June 30, 2011 at 2:57 pmSounds like you have a great system in place – thank you very much for sharing!
Yeah, I wish more people would go back to the 18th century almost sarcastic, “as my dear colleague said…” Or the famous Midwestern, “Oh she’s such a bonehead, God bless ‘er.” 🙂 Somehow those things don’t translate so well over Social Media though. Bummer, that, non?
Thanks for leaving such a great comment and offering such great advice.
Farnoosh says
August 10, 2011 at 1:47 pmLinking to this one from my post today, Margie. I am actually writing about the opposite of balance but this is a good ode to balance. Thanks :)!!