The other day I decided that I needed to try to put some of my social media use on hold for awhile. The reason is I have several web projects I need to work on and it is quite time consuming to have to monitor social networks across many different platforms. Not using social media at all though… well it's quite hard to do.
First I started with LinkedIn and wanted to see if I could deactivate my account for awhile. Technically you can't deactivate an account but you can set your account so that nobody can see it. This is basically the same thing as deactivating your account I guess since what good is a social media profile nobody can see? Anyway after I did that I moved onto Twitter.
Weighing the options of temporarily deactivating my Twitter account I realized it probably wasn't possible for me to actually stop using Twitter. I have auto posting setup for @AdamYamada and some other accounts which is kinda nice. Besides like LinkedIn it seems the only way to deactivate an account is to just set your profile to private. Of course the big difference here is that anyone that is following you can still see your Tweets and profile information. Sooo for now my Twitter accounts are intact but at least I uninstalled TweetDeck from Google Chrome. While TweetDeck is a great social media tool it can be hard to manage the Twitterverse.
Then I moved onto Facebook the biggest and baddest social networks around. Facebook at least has the option to keep your information intact but deactivate your account temporarily. It's nice keeping up with all your friends but let's be honest… Facebook is a blackhole. It sucks away all your productive time and you can never really get that time back.
I thought deactivating my Facebook account would be easy… ahhh I was wrong. I have several apps connected to my personal account and no other contributors. You can't deactivate the account and keep the Apps active without switching having an Administrator for the Apps that has a verified account. That means to deactivate the account I might need to get a prepaid phone to use with a dummy account or just ask someone to transfer use the apps.
Then came all the social bookmarking sites I have used. Damn, I've used a lot and a lot of them I never really understood or generated much traffic for me. This includes Reddit, Delicious, Tumblr, and more. Is it even worth time to delete those accounts?
So my goal of not using social media was a bit harder than I imagined it would be. It is all to easy to sign-up for these services but all too hard to truly leave. It is not in the best interest of the Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. if you stop using their services.
Even though all these social networks can be quite useful used in the right way a lot of people try to contact me through it instead of just sending me an email. I am just not really a fan of that as it takes a whole lot of time for me to direct message rather than just use my email. I guess that's old school but hey, I still get emails from Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest.
Bottom line not using social media at all nowadays is damn hard these days. I wish it was possible to click a few buttons to just take a break but that ain't possible my friends.
Have a similar story of trying to disconnect temporarily or permanently from social networking? Please share your story in the comments below. I'd be curios to hear stories and I know others would as well.