Where did my day go? I just sat down to check my email and now it’s dinner time. Along the way I stopped into Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn and before I knew it the day was gone.
Sound familiar? For many of us the allure of social networking is the ease by which we can stay in touch with family, friends and clients. And we can even make new friends and find new clients all through the magic of sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.
But, there is a danger, and I’m not talking about things like stalkers, viruses and other computer related things that go bump in the night. What I refer to as danger is what happened to me recently. I literally lost a day by spending so much time on my social networks that the day slipped by me.
I’ve been noodling around with the idea of coming up with a checklist of sorts to help me stick to the tasks at hand and avoid some of the temptations of spending too much time on non essential activities. So, when I ran across Brad Hanks and John Mayfield’s Social Media Accountability Scorecard I was elated. Go here to get your free copy: http://RealtyTechBytes.com/Scorecard
Brad and John have done a good job of isolating the social networking activities that will help your business. It’s a PDF that you can download and once you have it you can fill it in on your computer. Or, if you prefer, print it out. It looks pretty complete and I am sure that if you stick to it you will get a good handle on the the amount of time you spend in front of your computer on social networks.
There are two omissions though that I’d like to see rectified when they refresh the document. The first one is that there should be a field to record the date. That way you can save them and see how you do over time and then compare your activities to results. And the second one should be a field to record any appointments that you get as a result of your social networking activities.
After all, getting face to face with people should be the goal of any social networking activity in my not so humble opinion!
What’s your take?
Speaking of that, we've never met F2F to the best of my knowledge!
Instead of that scorecard, I put up a daily and weekly work plan with how much time and activity I should be doing on different areas (real estate, my product development and my volunteer work). It's in large enough print and posted right beside my monitor. Hopefully it will keep me on track and remembering that I need to do more than just the social media stuff.
That's another great idea Linda! Thanks for sharing!
No, never had the pleasure.
Jerry,
Great article! I will definitely be using the scorecard. I’ve been looking for something like this for a long time. Thank you for the help.
Interesting….I've recently had this conversation with several people….thanks for sharing, Jerry.
Hi Kathleen, it's a good topic to talk about. As much as I love the new social tools for generating business, I also have to monitor my usage…I love to just hang out with people and chat either F2F or virtually…
Me too…….I think I am going to work on more F2F time for a better balance~
This morning I came up with a great way to spend less time on Facebook. After I view the posts, I log out! That way I’m far less tempted to jump back into Facebook by jumping to my personal page. That extra step of having to log back in has already saved a bunch of time today.
Thanks for another great article. Where else could anybody get that kind of info in such a perfect way of writing? I’ve a presentation next week, and I am on the look for such information.