Wednesday, February 23, 2011

I'm a Social Media Failure

Fail Whale by iadornu.etsy.com


I'm finally ready to admit it. I suck at social media.

It's true that you can find me on twitter almost every day, either tweeting with friends or sharing a new listing on Etsy, but that only takes 30 seconds and 140 characters - or less! Of course I then spend the next hour scrolling back in time reading new posts. But I get my own tweets in, I make connections, and I even generate a sale on occasion. Twitter works. It's everything else that I have a problem with.

The Oh So Retro Facebook page is sadly neglected and my Flickr page has seen better days. Even my new Tumblr has already been abandoned, and we all know how often I update my blog. My poor blog... thought of often, written in never.

It's not that I don't want to participate in social media. I like it. I'm with it. I know how to do all this stuff... I just don't and I'm not sure why. As soon as I sit down on the computer I find myself in a cycle bouncing from one webpage to the next, reading and looking for things but not actually accomplishing anything. I can spend half an hour reading about The Kinks or vintage magazines or girls who look like Justin Bieber but can't find the time to upload pictures to Flickr or post a link on my fan site.

I see many women who have shops full of fresh items and blogs full of content and I think - why can't that be me? It's not like they have an extra pair of hands or an extra hour in the day that I don't have. They just sit down and work instead of sitting down with the idea of maybe working and oh hey look pictures of kittens in sweaters!

At the beginning of the year Randy asked me "How is this year going to be different from the last?" and I ask myself this when I am thinking of where I am and where I want to be. How am I going to make sure that this year is successful? What can I do to make Oh So Retro better?

I have a few social media goals that I want to start working on every day, just an hour during my lunch break that would usually be spent wasting time online. My list includes twitter, facebook, flickr, tumblr and of course blogger. How much time to you spend working on your social media/web presence? Do you find it makes a difference? I'm going to get serious about it for a few months to see if it helps. It can't hurt, even if it just helps me break my addiction to blogs about texting errors and animals wearing hats.