Pareto, Facebook and Necessary Endings

A few weeks ago I took stock of where I was making my content available on the internet and the relative amount of engagement that I was getting at each “location”.

As a result of that review, I made some changes to the way that I publish my content. It was a hard process, because I had many potential outlets and hated to shut down any of them.

But necessary endings are part of life, and looking at the bang for the buck through the lens of the Pareto Principle (my good friend the 80/20 rule) it make sense to shut down a few things to allow me to foster the relationships and content that has the greatest potential to help folks make a difference in the world.

First to go was my public Facebook page. There was not a whole lot of interest here and I was seeing my reach get less and less due to changes in the way that Facebook decides what is shown on the newsfeed of my followers. After a head’s up to my followers, I shut it off. While I do maintain a personal Facebook page, it’s for family and close friends only, I don’t open this network up to folks outside those circles.

Then I stopped the Google+ and Instagram: feeds that were not resulting in much engagement and discussion.

This leaves me with just a few quality channels of content distribution that I can tailor to the specific group of folks who want to engage with me:

• JohnDRegan.info — is my home base. The center of my platform where I spend most of my time sharing the top content. This is where I share content relating to you and I leaving average behind. I cover a wide range of subjects here: leadership, technology, life planning, simplifying, etc. It’s where I share what I’m learning in my quest to live a life that makes a difference in the world. If you’re wanting to get the highest quality content from me, sign up to get my posts right to your email at johndregan.info.
• LeadThruExample.com — this is the hub of my leadership development and coaching platform. Shared by both myself and my wife, LeadThruExample.com is the place where we refer potential coaching clients and those folks who are focused on leadership development and life planning content. LeadThruExample.com is a distillation, a narrowing of the field of the areas that I have interest in. It’s a smaller subset of the things that I’m sharing, but focused on just those few areas that give folks the most bang for the buck in coaching, leadership development and life planning content. Again, we encourage folks to visit the site and sign up to get our posts delivered via email to ensure you don’t miss an article. LeadThruExample.com
• Twitter: The primary place that I post not only my coaching, leadership development, but also my Leaving Average Behind challenges, and anything else that catches my professional interests. Twitter is the primary social network in terms of engaging in discussions and back and forth about the content. Of the social channels, @jdregan is the top of my list, with me engaged at least daily (and sometimes multiple times per day depending on what’s going on in the world). I’d love to connect with you on Twitter!
• LinkedIn: Focused on encouraging and challenging leadership and management change, LinkedIn is a location where I cull all the content that I think of posting online and share between 25-30% of the top most information. It’s the professional, streamlined social sharing and engaging that I do. You’ll find me at http://www.linkedin.com/in/johndregan two to four posts per week.

Currently in the dark horse category is Medium. Beautiful formatting and a stripped down user experience make this site a great place to share my content. You’ll find me at: medium.com/@jdregan. I’m going to keep evaluating medium…it’s got great promise!

Paring down and simplifying these online venues has led to significantly more time for me to interact with others and cleared the “mental” overhead associated with maintaining various online outposts. While it was challenging, I’m really glad that I took the time to make the changes.

I’d encourage you to look at your life and do some necessary endings in the areas that aren’t helping to further your goals and dreams.

Seasons come and go, embrace this concept and keep moving forward…leaving average behind!