Social Media as a timewaster

I really love social media. But too much is just too much.

Well, anybody who knows me has the opinion, that I am a so called »social media freak«. It is said that I’d knew every social network, since I register as an early bird to make my own opinion about them.

Yes, I do that. Or, well, I did that. I changed my behaviour, since it came to me, that every registration and every peek I try to make into a new social network costs time. Time I don’t want to spend anymore.

This was a typical day for me for a long time: Every morning my radio alarm clock comes on, so that I wake up softly, as I would call it. When I was able to open my eyes, I grabbed my smartphone (here: my iPhone) and opened Twitter, Facebook, Instagram AND my rss reader Reeder. So I nearly read half an hour in the morning just my timelines from the last night – with nearly 200 people I follow on Twitter, 300 friends on Facebook and sites I liked there and I don’t know how much followings on Instagram. And oh, don’t forget the 100+ rss feeds I subscribed! And I did the same thing in the city train on my way to work, at work on the toilet (when I needed a five-minute-break as a non-smoker), on my way back to my flat and in the evening before I went to sleep.

You see, being active on different social networks or retrieving much information means to invest not a small amount of time. And since I got a new job this March, I simply don’t have the time anymore to follow all of these social networks. So, from time to time, I thought about which social network I could abolish. I came to the following (in no particular order): FourSquare, Flickr, Gowalla, Forrst, Readmill, DailyBooth, deviantArt, Instagram, Diaspora*, Path, Formspring, We Heart It, Zootool, Instapaper and many many more. All those timelines with new content and all those profiles which wanted to be filled … I couldn’t stand it anymore.

So by now, there aren’t many social networks where I am really active. There is Twitter, which is great for retrieving information. Facebook, which I read in the morning and in the evening – since all my friends are using it actively, I can stay passive and just catch up with their lives. After Facebook there comes my rss reader, Reeder, which I use for staying up-to-date which things like Apple news or blog posts of people I know or I’d wish to know.
After that, well … the rest of »my« social networks I have a profile, and not very much more: Google+, Tumblr (including my personal blog, where I at least try to post regularly), Xing, Pinterest, QuoteFM, 500px, Dribbble, Github, Vimeo, Last.fm and Soundcloud. But within most of these social networks I do not really post regularly. I do not even regularly read their timelines or equivalent news streams. Most of these are just profiles I have there for the sake of having it. And using it from time to time. But not very actively. You know?

But all in all I can say that I have more quality time since I reduced the amount of social networks. I think about it twice before I register to a new one. And I am more confident about deleting a profile and not keeping it since I could use it some time in the future.

So, what is your opinion to social media accounts? How many do you have? And how many of them do you keep regularly up-to-date and how many gather just more and more dust?