Social media fatigue sets in

“I get overloaded. Who has time to look at all this, even in one venue (ie. Facebook?). Can’t explain the ROI to traditional old school print ad clients. I want a model of measurement for each if there is such a thing. I need to take more time to understand it…but think much of it is too time consuming — Twitter is … useless.”

You can just feel the frustration pouring out of the person who posted this message on a LinkedIn group asking people for their biggest challenges using social media.

Other responses included: “Sifting through the noise to find the gems”; and “Time AND cutting through the garbage AND making it 2-way. And, lots a people just selling/hawking.”

I think we are seeing a new phase in social media that is becoming more prevalent – fatigue. For our generation, first there was the bewilderment. Then the fear about how to use it. Most of us followed that up with jumping in enthusiastically to learn how to use it. Now, a growing number of people are so frustrated by the amount of time they are committing to this for very little obvious return that they are simply giving up.

While in some ways this is understandable, it also demonstrates one of the pitfalls of social media – too many people just use these tools for the sake of it without having a clear strategy and goals.

You could easily spend several lifetimes lurking around on these sites clicking through billions of links. You can’t be on every social media site, so for businesses, the trick is to find the sites where you can have meaningful interactions with people who might, some day, become customers.

While it is relatively easy to build up a huge following on Twitter by randomly following thousands of people and attracting a large number of automatic follow-backs, the vast majority, I would bet, are of no use whatsoever. It makes much more strategic sense to build a smaller community of high quality contacts who are contributing useful information – and, of course, contributing yourself.

As a public relations business based in Scotland, we target sites where we can reach out to potential clients, so naturally, we are members of a number of business networking groups. As a graduate of Strathclyde University, I also post my blog on the Strathclyde alumni site and this has proved to be extremely useful.

As a result of posting regularly on this site, I was asked to give a presentation on social media to the MBA class there last week, which was extremely enjoyable. To get the opportunity to speak to a group of people who either are – or will go on to be – very influential business figures, was another great result from our social media activity.

This is exactly the kind of relationship-building that can be achieved if you use social media properly – and it’s why, despite some of the headaches, it is worth sticking with.