As I wade daily through the deluge of tweets, messages, games, updates and other such information from social media sites, I wonder if the abundance of such sites and their information will detract from the message everyone wants to deliver or the conversations people and companies want to have. Is social media, in fact, poised for the same ill-fate as junk email and its arcane relative, the snail junk mail?
I use Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook for different proposes. May be because I use all of them actively I feel inundated with information. I keep up with friends on Facebook, professional contacts on LinkedIn and try to post something useful in each. I follow about 400 people on Twitter and can't get through all of their tweets or follow all of their links on my daily visits. This is even after I started using two tools for managing the tweets, TweetDeck and SocialOomph.
On Twitter, some of the people I follow, in-turn, follow tens of thousands of people. how do they keep up with all the tweets?
What's more, I see a lot of self-promoting messages on some of these sites. This is the part that made me wonder whether social media will become as annoying as junk mail or email. However, the answer is that it may not. After all, unlike email and snail mail, I can stop having someone as a Facebook friend, or a Twitter followee. I can quite easily stop all the chatter from those that provide nothing but noise.
What do you think?
Do you think we will eventually be as annoyed with social media as we are with junk email and snail mail? Feel free to send in your comments.