The Personal Social Media Experiment

Posted on the 05 November 2013 by Nelle @ImSoJheanelle

Photo Credit : Mashable.com

In the midst of job hunting and working on personal sideprojects, I found myself engaging increasingly in social media. My spare time has allowed me to catch up on world news, do rigorous job searches and read. I decided to conduct a small experiment to ascertain how much time I actually spent on social media.  First , I scoured the search engines to see if there were any similar experiments and compare myself to the results by others.

The excerpt of the infographic shows the results in a national surveyHowever when I compared my results in the, I had to wonder if the same variables applied to my current situation. I am home, so there is more time on my hands and I have a business account and a personal account on most of these networks.

The Method.

My study ranged from October 18 to  November 1, 2013, and before I did my daily browsing, tweeting and updating, I started a timer on the stopwatch. The time was recorded on an Excel spreadsheet for each time I went to a different social media platform. I must admit that I messed up a few times, but I remembered just in time. I got into a rhythm after the fourth day.

The Results.

I spent exactly 68.7 hours on Social Media in the time span 2 weeks.
The infographic displays the following information:
Facebook : 35.5 hours
Twitter : 23.2   hours
Instagram :  3 hours
Pinterest : 5.8 hours
LinkedIn : 1 hour
Google+ : 12 minutes

The Lesson.

I spent too much time on Facebook! I should be focused more on LinkedIn at this point in my transition phase. Now that I am aware of this wasted time, I will attempt to adjust my behavior accordingly.
Do you feel you spend too much time on social media?
What  techniques do you utilize to manage your time on social media?