Social Media; the best friend you love to hate?

Life was so much simpler when twitter was simply a noise the birds made in the morning and klout was something I got from my mum when I was naughty or rude, when the only thing you did with tumblrs was drink out of them and google was just a nice little search engine that we used sometimes.  How times have changed and how my poor addled brain has struggled to come to terms with the joy that is social media.

It all started so simply. Last summer I fell in love with Twitter. It was new and exciting, getting new followers, receiving tweets, I loved it. Then I discovered blogging from there and for that I am truly grateful. Then twitter grew. Suddenly I am following more people and gaining followers. That heady feeling when I passed one hundred. One hundred people, following little old me! I remember discussing this with a friend and her husband turning round to me and saying with great disdain; "why would 100 people want to follow you?". Well Mr disdain, I have 1800 followers now, so stick that where the sun doesn't shine!!

So Twitter grew as did by blog and people actually started reading it. Then I discovered Klout. I had no idea what it was then and a year on I'm not sure I have a clue now. Every now and then it emails me to tell me that I am influential about some weird and wonderful topic that I am so not influential about such as football, cars, weddings and the best one; pancakes!! How can you be influential about pancakes?? Although the one that really makes me laugh is SEO! Now that I can assure you in no uncertain terms that I am most definitely not influential about SEO. I wish.

So I acquired a klout score for what it was worth and I even downloaded an app on my phone which displayed my score. Great, a constant reminder of my dismal Klout score, just what I needed. So then I turned to the great god of media; Google, to find out about Klout and where I was going wrong. That was where I went wrong. Apparently Twitter is not enough. Klout is fuelled by a range of social media platforms and I needed to be 'engaging' people on these differing platforms. Ok deep breaths. So then I start setting up accounts like a mad woman. No idea what I'm doing! What's tumblr again?? So then I am on Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, Flickr, Tumblr, Google + to name but a few and I am trying to juggle all of these things even though I don't have a clue why or what I'm doing.  Has my Klout score improved?  No, in fact it has gone down.  It is a bit of a standing joke now with my husband, who doesn't understand any of this stuff at all and now whenever I go to do something, he says; "That won't help your Klout score!"

I am now starting to find my feet with some of them, but the problem is that there are not enough hours in the day. Real life gets in the way. I want to blog, I want to write and I love blogging, but I also want people to read my blog, so the social media package is a necessary evil.  I decided last week to try and get to grips with Google +.  I spent ages looking at my profile and then my page and then other people's pages.  Then I realised with horror that I had accidentally emailed some of my posts to people in my 'circles', thus spamming the hell out of people.  I got so stressed about it that I have been dreaming about Google + and Facebook and that really can't be good.

There are so many positives to social media and blogging and I have to take a very deep breath and remember that.  My email in box makes me laugh on a regular basis, I have so many emails these days, I feel quite popular and there are so many people in spam offering me millions of pounds even though they have never met me before, I find that quite entertaining.  Most importantly I have connected with an amazing group of people  and there is always help to be found, funny stories to share, amazing posts to be read and photos to be seen.  Without social media, I would miss out on so much.  So for now at least, I shall stop worrying about my ever plummeting Klout score and enjoy the fact that my little blog is a year old in a couple of days and who knows I might be infuential about social media one day....