Maybe this isn’t you, but I am getting burned out on “social media”.

LinkedIn Answers and Group Discussions used to be useful. Now its so much self-promotional crap. One group had to turn off discussion because it was filled with useless posts. It was near impossible to keep up with the message board or to find anything useful.

Facebook is a trip. It wants to be your personal network AND your business network. That doesn’t work. Unless you can separate your profile, there will be co-mingling of business and personal. Do you really want your clients to see pictures of you partying or your updates complaining about the day? Probably not going to end well.

Let’s say that Facebook is primarily for your business. Do you really want to discuss the government and your politics every day? On some profiles, it sounds like nothing but complaining. Every day. Who wants to work with someone like that? Or what if your are a NeoCon, but your prospective client is a Libertarian? Maybe you just lost that opportunity.

Then there are the people who want to connect to you on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter – AND repeat there message across every network automatically! That drives me nuts! I don’t need to hear about your new website on all 3 platforms. I don’t need every Tweet to show up in Facebook. Why do you do that?

When I started on LinkedIn there was a group called the LION’s – LinkedIn Open Networkers who wanted to connect to everyone. Who had the most connections. (Who had the biggest …. or who had no friends in school is more like it). I never thought it was a numbers game. I thought it was about connecting to people in my Industry that I could actually network with. But I have found that most of the “big numbers” folks on LI don’t respond to messages. Isn’t that Social?

Twitter hitting mainstream to me means that every snake oil salesperson will be bothering me. Tweeting repeatedly about his latest blog post or video is annoying. (When did Twitter replace RSS feeds?) There is nothing Social about Social Media any more.

I am on these networks to interact with people in marketing and telecom. I want to learn and share. I want to help people in my network to be successful. To do that I connect with people with profiles that respond and have something to say, to add to a conversation. I use the delete and unfriend key liberally now. Why?

Social Media takes time. Time is more valuable than money. (I can make more money).

Remember two things: anything posted to these platforms will be archived forever and the first word is SOCIAL.