Some of you know that I take each August off from social media and I will mostly do that again this year. I might decide to write a blog post or two, but I have such a strong group of contributors to Biznology that you might not notice my absence. But people have told me that you just can’t take off from social media. And they are starting to convince me. But I still want to clear my head and I think that’s valuable, too, so I want to have another social media fast this year. What to do?
Enter the magic of scheduling.
In the past year, I’ve enjoyed the use of WordPress, which lets me schedule posts in a way that I never mastered with Movable Type. So, I can write a few evergreen posts and schedule them for later in the month.
And the same thing works on Twitter. While I do retweet colleagues that have interesting things to say, and I also comment on events, I do a lot of tweeting on so-called best practices–just things that are good ideas that people ought to do. I find that I can queue up a bunch of those tweets and have them roll out during the month. CoTweet was the first scheduling attempt, but when it started to charge for usage, Gremlin became the next tool of choice, and now Seesmic is the latest experiment. No matter which tool you use, you can find a way to do it.
And everything that is tweeted gets mirrored to Facebook and LinkedIn, so I am not dark on those networks either. (Still waiting for an API so I can do the same thing for Google+–are you listening, Big G?)
And I will also have other people monitoring what is being said so that at least people get a thank you or a response without me having to be there.
All of this takes a little up-front work, and it isn’t easy, but it lets me kick back without going dark, so I think it is worth the effort. Now, it isn’t as good as doing everything live because when something happens, I won’t be able to comment. (I probably won’t even know it happened right away.)
But that’s OK with me. I know that it won’t be the same as if I am doing everything live, but I think it is better than being out of sight completely. So, it’s a compromise. I still get the mind break from my social media fast but whatever value I get from social media doesn’t go to zero.
I’ll be interested in what others think of the approach. Do any of you go dark on social? How do you clear your heads from the always-on culture? Tell me in the comments.
