By now you’ve already heard of the heavy hitters in social media sites. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. I could easily list out a lot more, but there’s no need for all of that. Now with all these sites vying for your attention, status updates, friend requests, link sharing, liking, recommending; at what point is all of this “too much?”
I could be biased in my opinion on this because I’m a web designer. Or should I say consultant. Talking with my peers about this very subject matter recently posed the question about “social media noise.” That noise to us is getting a bit louder. Kind of like those TV commercials that purposely run with double the volume than the normal ones regardless of the volume level on your television set.
Why do we call it noise? Well that’s because on our side of things we’re inundated with it all. Our line of business demands that we are fully aware – if not experts on all of the types of media, how they work, and be versed in using them. We need to know their strengths, weaknesses, and their rank against other similar mediums. Now as a business owner, marketer, or average consumer, this may not seem like noise. Most are already conditioned to seeing such buttons and interact with only a few of these sites with much less frequency.
Now let me paint the big picture. Those of you who own or manage websites, already know the value of social media. We don’t need to explain why it is so important. Advertising is huge. And if you look at the progression of ads from just 5 years ago to this date, you can see it has come a long way. But lately, technology has given us ways to purposely limit the ads we see, how we see them, when and where we see them. With a DVR we can skip commercials entirely. With RSS feeds, we can read articles without having to buy a newspaper and fumble through ads. Spam filters block or capture ad emails. Wouldn’t it only make sense that there would be a way to limit the noise or advertisements of social media? Think about it and post your comments below. I’d like to get your feedback and/or debates.
I think that the buzz social media is generating is gradually increasing daily and that if we’re not careful, it can be overwhelming. The key is to administer control over your “receiving end” early in the game. Watching who you follow and who you subscribe too up front will help to limit the social mud that will most likely develop if kept unchecked.
I have fallen victim to this on twitter. Inherently, it is a venue susceptible to update “flooding” since its micro blogging medium is, in essence, geared toward quick moment to moment updates. Follow the wrong kind of people and you can easily get lost in the nonsense.
I’m sure that sometime in the future, someone will invent or code some kind of app that will have a spam button for this kind of thing. Until then, the only solution (aside form not subscribing to anything) is to watch who you follow.
Yea, good words there Dom! I also agree with what you said about Twitter. It is really easy to have a special or important tweet get lost in a timeline. Fortunately Google cares for our precious tweets and comments. As for the spam, that’s why I personally don’t follow everyone who follows me. That’s my noise/volume control there.