Taking stock and decluttering

Suffering from social networking burnout? Here are some tips to help manage your digital life.

1. Take stock of the sites you have joined or may want to join: CheckUserNames would show you 160 social networking sites and search them to determine if your name or brand is available for an account or if it’s already been taken. (Sorry, John Smiths.)

2. Streamline: If you’re often logging into multiple social networks to repost the same content, sites like OnlyWire, Ping.fm and HelloTxt let you update several networks with a single mouse click.

3. Plan ahead: When using Twitter for business or personal brand building, you can write tweets in advance and publish them automatically at a later date with services like Buffer, SocialOomph, HootSuite, TwitResponse, FutureTweets and Pluggio.

4. Consolidate: Sites like Digsby and Netvibes reduce desktop clutter by providing a single dashboard to send e-mails and instant messages, and update all your social networks. If the only thing you want to open is your e-mail inbox, NutshellMail would take a snapshot of the updates on your social media sites (including Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, LinkedIn, Myspace and YouTube) and send them to you in an e-mail digest. For those with multiple Twitter accounts, TweetDeck is a way to post from any of them using just one dashboard.

5. Create a landing page: If you’re on multiple networks, it’s probably because you want to connect with people. Sites like Retaggr and DandyID allow you to create a free digital business card and a web page with links to all of your networking pages, blogs and websites. (This also helps keep track of your digital footprint.)

6. Tame Twitter: Want to remove your inactive Twitter followers? Nest.Unclutterer promises to do it for you. Searching for someone by name on Twitter is exasperating. You can save time and limit the frustration by looking for them on Listorious instead. If you are not using a site that automatically shortens URLs when you paste them into Twitter, download a browser extension, like Bitly.

7. Measure your progress: If you use social media to promote your business or brand, you can monitor how well you’re doing with sites like SocialReport, TwentyFeet and SproutSocial. To find out how influential you are, there are sites that assign ratings to people, like Klout and PeerIndex. Empire Avenue, which bills itself as ‘the social stock market’, looks at each of your social networks, assesses your level of activity and engagement, and then allocates you a virtual share price. Here, network management becomes something of a game, where users invest virtual currency in one another’s profiles.

8. If you’re committed to simplifying, do the thing that you may be avoiding: Explore Google+. Mike Elgan of Computerworld said the site had so many features, it can practically replace all forms of online communication. “Don’t think of Google+ as yet another social site to deal with,” he wrote in a recent post. “Think of it as the only social site you have to deal with.”

©2011 The New York
Times News Service