Folksy – Artonomy

Social media can be fun, a great way to network and spread the word about your art to the world and enjoy new collaborations. It can also be a terrifying time sink of gargantuan proportions of the kind where you wake up on Saturday morning and realise you have spent the entire week poking at Facebook and Twitter and achieved NOTHING else. Not good. So this little post deals with a few ideas to help you deal with social media in ways that are a bit more efficient and which can help you reclaim your life. Scheduling – for fun and relaxation. There is a big secret to reclaiming your life from the tentacles of social media... and that secret is SCHEDULING... If you can limit the time you spend on social media to, say one or two 15 minute session it stops you from getting embroiled in addictive checking. You can set up a bunch of links first thing in a morning to post later. Then you can close down Twitter & Facebook and get on with the good stuff, like painting and creating. Will scheduling make me an evil robot? Looking on Twitter it's easy to spot the absolute abuse of scheduling software. Streams of random links and spam, offering ways to make $3000 dollars at home, posted by bots with no human interaction. This is clearly not where you want to be, but it doesn't have to be like this. You can use scheduling to post your links but take time in your 15 minutes update time to check on what's happening, thank people for retweets, chat and interact with people. You can still be human. Scheduling just means you get all the grunt work done, actually leaving more time for the lovely enjoyable human stuff. Which software to use? There are some great pieces of free software on line which will help you automate many aspects of your social media presence. These are my favourites... Tweetdeck I use Tweetdeck.com as my main weapon of choice when dealing with Twitter. You can set up tweets and schedule them for a particular time. You can also see your streams of followers, mentions and direct messages extremely easily making it a snap to keep on top of what is happening. I spend 15 minutes or so first thing scheduling my posts for the day and replying to messages. I will then check back towards the end of the day to chat. Tweetdeck also allows you to add other social services including Facebook. Networked Blogs Networked Blogs is extremely handy for taking your blog and feeding it into Facebook. This is my main use for this application but you can also feed your blog straight to Twitter too. Dlvr.It I have recently discovered www.dlvr.it and found it really useful for sending an RSS feed from a blog into individual Twitter posts. The great thing about dlvr.it is that you can schedule the posts for the best time for you and specify how many are posted at any one time, preventing flooding. You also get stats on how your posts performed. Extremely informative. What about Google + ? Google+, the new social networking phenomena from Google is growing at a phenomenal rate. It offers a lot of the functionality and advantages of Twitter and Facebook without the complexity. It is easy to use and offers content sharing, the ability to network with people you don't know {like Twitter} as well as share content with your close friends {like Facebook} all in one place. It is a simpler, more streamlined "one-stop-shop" for the sharing of content and images and as such has the potential to be a definite time saver. However, it's usefulness will be ultimately governed by how many people join and the levels of useage it attracts. It looks extremely promising though and is well worth joining for artists, giving you the advantage of being in there early. At the moment, Google+ is by invitation only so try and grab one if you can from someone you know who is already using it. Reclaim your life... Automating some parts your social media presence will really help you to free up your life from some of the more time stealing elements of this area of the web. Importantly it will allow you to focus on the really important part of social media. Communicating with people. Share the tips and software/apps that work for you in the comments...