What happens if you stop tweeting for a whole month! A personal lesson in the benefits or otherwise of social media.

34 days ago I tweeted my last chirpy goodbyes to you all announcing that I’d be back in a couple of weeks and thereby my abstinence from social media began.  

My plan was always to start chirping again in a couple of weeks tweeting as good as before, but as that deadline drew to a close (along with my annual family holiday coming to an end), there was something in me that urged me to abstain yet further.  Why not extend it a tad longer and refrain from social media for the whole of August?  After all, across europe our whole L&D industry seems to go to sleep, there would likely be no one there to read my ramblings anyway I mused.  I needed little persuading, the truth was I had felt something of a burden lifted over the past two weeks, releasing my slavish attendance to various social media streams had proven to be a pleasurable thing.  So in a moment the remainder of August became not only twitter free, but FB and Blog free.  What would become of me?

The good news is, I’m still here - astonishingly you can see this change had no detrimental impact on my well being.  Neither did the world come to an end, although it has to be recorded for purposes of accuracy that my longstanding cat Figaro did kick the bucket in circumstances too unpleasant to write of here.  

On the positive side I managed instead to go about some things that were if nothing else of personal therapeutic worth.  In the past few weeks I’ve read more books than the last 7 months put together.  I’ve really enjoyed some long dog walks on some of the UK’s finest beaches, to-boot generating some pleasure fiddling about with the B&W setting on my little camera.  Then perhaps my crowning glory (although family members aren’t in total accord) was to purchase a little Ukelele and learn a bundle of hits from decades now referred to only in history books!  If nothing else I’ve had fun filling my time without feeling the need to draught a single witty or profound tweet, not even during more than a few hours of BBC Olympics coverage.  

But what of my presence on the web?  A google search for “iManage” now returns us in third place when it had been first place all year, and my blog views are only down 90%!  Yes down 90%!!!  

Ho hum, I suppose as September dawns in the name of marketing I do need to get back to it then, but in so doing I’m introducing a handful of simple rules to help calibrate my social media fix:

1. Stop doing social media when involved in other things like walking the dogs or spending time with loved ones. 
2. Limit the frequency of tweets, for me a few a day is fine.  
3. Use social media just as much for my personal pleasure as for business marketing (I may follow a few Ukelele feeds!).

If you haven't already you really should try a little SM abstinence sometime soon, at least so long as you don’t have a cat.