If you are like me, you may have genuinely considered hiring someone to manage all this crap, then realized you could only afford to pay that person in carpet lint. Hiring someone to manage your social life makes about as much sense as hiring someone to throw glitter on you whenever you do something impressive. It would be cool, yes, but ultimately it could get very messy.
Some of you may be aware that I am currently training for Ironman in 2013. Keeping track of my internet social media presence wasn't exactly easy before I started I started going on 6 hour bike rides, but now it's gotten to the point where I dread picking up my phone after a workout. Those cute little notification flags are the bane of my existence. I'm not ignoring you, I swear, I'm just too busy breaking into an overwhelmed, cold, sweaty panic to actually respond to anyone.
When I do have spare seconds, I need to decide which global friend group would care to hear from me, as I often have only enough time to update one page. Luckily, I have stumbled upon (no pun intended) a workable solution to the status update conundrum. And luckily for you, I like to share (haha, obviously). The solution I found is called HootSuite. This social media manager allows you to add your networks like Twitter and Facebook, and also link secondary social sites via 'Apps' like Instagram, Flickr, YouTube and StumbleUpon. The HootSuite interface links together your networks to post status updates everywhere at once. For example, when I post this article on Blogger, my Twitter, Facebook and Google+ accounts will all announce it for me.
The interface is shown below:
Now that I am more effective at sharing via social media channels, I might be curious about my overall influence on the internet. Currently, the popular way to measure this is by finding your Klout score (link goes to wikipedia). Theoretically, the Klout score looks at your social media sites and scrapes data from them about your reach and level of influence online. Klout scores are measured on a scale of 1-100 for everyone who has a social network (including businesses and organizations), so you already have one; but if you want any control over which sites are used to get the score, you need to create an account on Klout.com. In case you were wondering, my Klout score is 40.
Now that things are more easily managed, I can focus on generating healthy exercise sweat instead of slimy internet panic sweat.
