Social Media 101: How Not to Waste Time

Social media is great for a variety of different purposes. For one thing, you can catch up to a lot of people you otherwise might never get to see or talk to again. For another, you can post all kinds of things about your own life, and let your hundreds of casual acquaintances marvel at how awesome life is for you. On top of that, you can while away thousands of hours pretending to run a farm, command an army, hold together a motley crew of mafioso types, and do a bunch of other things that will ultimately make no difference in your real life. The following are some ways you can avoid doing the time-wasters, so you can use your social media time for more useful things.

Ask yourself what you’ll get out of it

Sometimes the best way to understand how much time you’ve wasted is to assign a numerical value to your time’s value. Imagine you’re used to making $10 an hour. Is spending three hours on that carefully manicured farm of yours really worth $30 to you? While you aren’t actually spending this money or borrowing it from lenders, you also aren’t making it. Considering how many ways there are to make money online these days, that’s a crying shame.

Allow yourself some “wasted” time

If you want to spend an hour or two having some fun and blowing off a little steam, that’s okay. You should never beat yourself up about taking some fun time for yourself, or pretty soon your life will be neurotic and you’ll be a full-fledged workaholic. As long as your fun time doesn’t turn into an excessive amount of time that could be spent on things you need to do, it’s all good.

Don’t worry about time that’s long gone

Maybe you used to waste a lot of time on social media sites, but now you’ve moved on to being a more moderate user. If you beat yourself up over what you used to do, you’ll only make yourself feel bad over nothing. There is no getting back time that’s gone. So you just need to forgive yourself for what you did in the past, and then move on. Fretting over the past is also wasting time.

Social media is a great way to waste time. In moderation, there’s nothing wrong with playing a few silly games. Just be sure you’re doing the things you need to do, too.

Hook up with your favorite brands

Of course it’s no waste of time to follow your favorite individuals and companies, just like you would do in magazines and newspapers. One of the great things about social media is that you can track your favorite products as well- mine being ones like Coca Cola, Ajinomoto and Nike.

All in all..it’s never a waste of time to have fun!

Published by Wayne Ernest on January 17, 2012 in Business and tagged Ajinomoto, Nike, social media tips • Did you like it? Subscribe to RSS | Tweet it! | Stumble it! | Google Buzz it! | Submit it to Blogosphere News