5 Effortless Ways To Stop Wasting Time On Twitter While Maintaining An Engaged Profile
Scrolling on social media is akin to being sucked by the black hole. The gravitational pull is so strong that you may find it hard to tear yourself away from the trending feed. On average, we spend about 142 minutes or 2 hours and 22 minutes daily on social media.
This is a lot considering our media consumption is already very high. A report by Nielsen reveals that American adults spend over 11 hours in a day reading, watching, listening, or interacting with media.
Four years ago, this figure stood at 9 hours, 32 minutes. It seems like our media consumption is growing unabated. What’s even more surprising is that we spend about 3 hours and 48 minutes on tablets, smartphones, and computers.
Admittedly, some of this time may be productive, but a lot of the time we spend on social media chips in unproductive hours. So what do we do? I’m mainly active on Twitter, but just like you, I’ve to keep a check on the time I spend on the platform.
To this end, I’ve been finding these five ridiculously simple tips very helpful, and I’m hoping these will help you too.
1. Schedule content for selected hours
You know this tip was coming, right? It’s part of almost every article that talks about saving time on social media. But, that’s because it really is effective. Plan your content in advance, log it into your favorite social media scheduling tool, and you’re good to go. Except, that’s not all.
Setting and forgetting is the very recipe of social media doom or an unengaged profile. You need to set the tweets and periodically check Twitter to answer notifications.
A tip here is to learn the best times for posting so that you are tweeting at a time when you get more engagement. One way to succeed here is to not schedule content during prominent Twitter chat hours.
But what would you do if you didn’t get the time to schedule content before the new week or month starts? Here’s what you can do.
2. Steal moments to tweet but not on Twitter
In an ideal case, I prepare Tweets for the new week or fortnight over the weekend or on Fridays. But ideal scenarios don’t play out each time. After all, we’re all human with no superpowers or full-time charged batteries.
When I miss scheduling content, there are two ways out of the situation:
i. Take out 30 minutes daily to schedule content for the day
30 minutes aren’t much and you can easily prepare and schedule between 3–5 tweets for the day. You can then keep popping in and out of Twitter to engage with your audience.
ii. Steal moments to Tweet
I wouldn’t suggest that you take out moments to tweet now and then. This can be a time-consuming ordeal, sipping on your productivity flow. Instead, write a quick tweet (when something is on your mind) and type it out in your social media scheduling tool.
That’s what I’ve been doing for a month or two. This process helps me in several ways:
- I don’t go to post a Tweet and get caught up in my newsfeed
- I don’t keep revisiting my account to check for any response to the Tweet
- I don’t let distractions seep in as I post my tweet in the scheduler, which is basically a barren land in contrast with a colorful happening-now Twitter feed
3. Don’t stay too long on the platform after Twitter chats
You can save time by logging out immediately after a Twitter chat is over. Post-twitter chats conversation is a thing, and most of the engaged community chats can suck you in for a good half hour after the chat is over, where you go through the pending notifications and interact further with tweeters.
In my view, this can take a lot of your time, and it’s not advisable to spend so much time because the primary aim of engaging with your community is over.
So, it’s best to chat in a manner that you’re done with the online networking session within the chat time and move over to your work once the chat is over.
4. Log out, don’t just close the tab
Fourthly, don’t just close the tab but log out of the platform. Use your phone to respond to notifications after every few hours. And then log out from the phone app as well.
The idea is that when you log out, you won’t be able to log back in instantly. In fact, logging back in will require the extra work of entering your username/email and password, which can be discouraging, helping you save time.
Don’t save the details on your browser though because logging back that way is just as instant as opening the already-logged-in tab.
It’s also wise to disable any push notifications. These can be the very distraction bombs that can take you off your work track so disable them unless enabling them is absolutely necessary.
5. Remove the app from your phone or place it away from other apps
Another effective way to save some time is to delete the app from your phone or place it on a not-so-easy-to-access position on your home screen. This will help you reduce the time that you spend on the app because checking it every time will slip from your mind.
Here’s my screen to make my point clear:
Most of the time, I use the screen on the left. By the time I’m done, I usually forget to swipe right, which helps me save some time.
Wrapping up, I’ve been using these simple tricks to stop myself from overspending time on Twitter.
What do you do to stop yourself from bingeing on social media?
