Staying involved in social media — without blogging

16 Jan

Posted by: Bryan in: Best practices

Things have been pretty quiet on this blog over the last month-plus, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been following and participating in my fair share of social media conversations. Of note:

I’ve been Tumbling responses to my (almost-) daily questions to my Twitter pals. Tumblr is an easy-to-use tool for publishing not only text posts, but also images, audio (one .mp3 per day) and video.
I continue to yap away on Twitter. This was my No. 1 tool for growing my personal network in 2007, and I expect more of the same this year.
After wiping out all of my Google Reader feeds in late December, I’ve slowly begun to rebuild my account this month. I’m trying to be more selective when adding feeds, so that I don’t wind up (again) with an unmanageable number of posts to wade through each day. Along the way, I’m also sharing posts that I find compelling and thought-provoking. (You can subscribe to my shared posts, too, if you’re so inclined.)
I’m leaving more comments to blogs, Flickr photos, Utterz posts, etc. than I had been at the end of last year. Being a true participant in the social media community should mean caring enough to reflect on and respond to what others are doing, writing, and saying, don’t you think?

So, what do you do?

If you’re a blogger and go through your own extended stretch of relative blogging silence, how else do you stay involved in the comings and goings of the social media world?

3 Responses

David Alston
16|Jan|2008 1

Great post Bryan. Twitter was indeed my best networking tool of 2007 and will be in 2008 no doubt. While I do have some RSS feeds set up I agree it gets a bit overwhelming if you leave it more than a day. Being at Radian6 I use our own solution to track what’s up in the social media field. Instead of setting it up to monitor a brand or company like most of our customers do I’ve set it up to track what’s up in social media. Works like a charm but hey I’m probably just a bit biased on that one

See you in Twitterville in 2008. Cheers. David
Bryan
16|Jan|2008 2

Thanks for the comment, David. You’re quite about getting overwhelmed by the number of RSS feeds if you don’t check in every day. Remember the “mark all as read” tool — it can be very helpful for you!

Subscribing to keyword searches for “hot topics” is a great way to monitor the important goings-on in social media. Is that how you caught this post?

See you on Twitter!
David Alston
16|Jan|2008 3

I hear ya on the “mark all read” option cause I’m not making any dent using the old fashion RSS feed reader option. I had added your blog as a feed to the RSS feeder in this case as a test of the old fashion manual methods.