Time Management

4 Incredibly Easy Methods To Achieve Social Media Balance

August 28, 2014 by Marc Guberti 4 Comments

It is fair to say that social media has taken over the lives of many people. People’s emotions are controlled by what other people post, and many people spend hours surfing on these social networks without thinking of the tasks they need to complete. Some people have been known to become depressed by spending too much time on their social networks. However, that’s not because social media is bad. The reason people get depressed is because they spend too much time on social media doing the wrong things.

On social media, Facebook in particular, friends take pictures of themselves living the good life. This makes a person feel horrible because they are not up to par with that friend. However, just because a friend took a picture that indicates happiness, that friend may have only been happy in the moment. Not everyone is happy just because they’re smiling in their avatar.

For some people, their uses of social media has gone too far. With more time checking out tweets and liking posts but less time outside and being with the people who are important to you, some people have lost themselves on social media. However, this is the time to break loose of the addiction. Most of us need more balance between the time we spend on social media and the time we spend doing other things. Here are four ways to restore that balance.

Do less surfing. A big reason why most people get trapped in social media is because they surf it too often. Without question, more time is spent surfing social media than is actually spent taking the time to write posts. If you cut down the amount of time you surf by 15-30 minutes every week, you will notice more time opening up and you being able to spend more time doing other things that you love to do.
Limit yourself to three social networks. I do not suggest limiting social networks for the business side, but if you are addicted to social media, more social networks will not do you any good. If you spend 1 hour every day on each social network you go on, and you have seven social networks, that’s a grand total of seven hours being wasted on social media. Limit yourself to three social networks. If you have more than three social networks, enter humongous passwords with your eyes closed for the other social networks so they can’t get hacked and you don’t remember the password. Then, if you choose to recover your password, you will have to click “Forgot your password.” Now you have more time to think about what you are going to do and if you should stop before logging into the social network.
Do more things outside of social media more often. Some people are addicted to social networks because they have nothing else going on in their lives. Some people have no one to interact with outside of home, and more unfortunate, some people have no one to interact with in their own home. You need to pursue other hobbies that take up time. I run for a minimum of 30 minutes every day, and some of my runs exceed two hours.
Get fit. This is not the corny 4th example because I could not think of a good one. Getting fit takes a lot of time, and it gives you more discipline. Getting fit requires you to workout as often as you can putting in as much effort as possible. Soon, surfing social media will no longer be the priority. Getting fit will take its place. In order to maximize the effects of getting more fit, do workouts with a partner. You will both challenge each other to show up every day and get the task done.

Social media addiction take up hours of your time, but if you know how to fight the addiction, you will find more time to do the things you forgot you loved to do. Some people feel that social media is their only source of happiness, but there’s more to life than tweets and selfies. Although I am on Twitter often, I don’t let it consume my life, and no one should have to stoop to that level. If you are at that level now, do these four things so you can successfully break your social media addiction. It may take some time to pull it off, but the more you think about it, the less likely you are going to start. Make the choice to start now so you do not live in regret and a bigger social media addiction later.

10 Signs That You Need To Be More Productive

August 24, 2014 by Marc Guberti 4 Comments

We are all very busy people. We get swamped by the workload, have to put in hours of work every day, have family commitments, and other types of commitments as well. Many people make the common mistake of believing that being busy also means being productive. There is a difference. As a result of the mistakes people make, productivity dips. Before you decide whether you need to increase your productivity, go through these 10 signs that will allow you to know whether you’re in trouble or not.

You complain about being so busy. Being busy means going to the grocery store, doing chores, and a plethora of other things unrelated to your work. If you always complain about being too busy, you are not getting the important work done.
You watch too much TV. I define watching 10 hours of TV every week as too much. Some people will nod their heads in agreement while others will get overwhelmed considering that the average American watches 32 hours of TV every week.
You always fall behind. Everyone falls behind on their work at a certain point in their lives. I have fallen behind, and chances are you have fallen behind too. However, if you are always falling behind in your work and it is becoming a trend, you need to increase your productivity. If you keep on falling behind, you will spend the rest of your life catching up instead of expanding.
You live in the 365 day mindset/trap. New Years resolutions. Did you forget about them? Over 80% of people never get their New Year’s resolutions accomplished because they believe they have an incredible amount of time to get the job done. Let’s say your New Year’s resolution is to gain 10,000 Twitter followers. That means you would have to gain an average of 28 followers every day. That’s not impossible at all. People think that if they wait a month and start on February, they can get the same goal accomplished by gaining 30 followers every day from now through the entire year. However, some people with this goal may wait to start on the first day of September because they realize they have a lot of time left. Now, there’s only 122 days to get the task accomplished which means someone would have to gain 82 followers every day from September 1st to the end of the year. It’s so much easier to start early and stick with it.
You Google it too often. If you Google anything related to “how to,” it means you want to be able to do that. The person who Googles “how to make money online” 100 times wants to make money online. If you are Googling “how to be more productive” numerous times, then you need to boost your productivity. Instead of constantly searching for more ways to be productive, stick with the methods in this blog post and you will be fine. I’m a 16 year old in high school and the school’s track team. I think I’m qualified to talk about productivity.
You would never think of waking up early in the morning. I’m a night owl and early bird at the same time. I get to bed past midnight and get up before 8 am. Waking up early in the morning allows you to be more productive because you have a greater chance of starting the day off with a positive attitude.
You wing the first hour you wake up. The first hour of waking up dictates how the rest of your day is going to go. If you wake up and hold grudges for the first hour, you are going to hold those grudges and have a bad day. If you read a motivational book, do a workout, or do what you love, you will have a day filled with motivation and empowerment. The first hour controls how productive you will be for the rest of the day, and if you don’t know what you do then, you need to create a schedule for what you will do for that first hour.
Do have too much on your plate. I had a score card overload, and I am not proud of it to this day. I wrote down 19 different goals on the score card that each took up a significant amount of time. I thought I would be able to write 20 blog posts, proofread an entire book, write a completely different book (and finish that book), do 10 YouTube videos, write 20 scripts, and prepare for the summer bootcamp my brother and I did at Fordham University (among plenty of other high level tasks) was an impossibility. I had too much on my plate and ended up being very unproductive for the entire week. Less is more because you get to focus more of your attention on fewer things.
You are striving for the wrong types of goals. If your goals are having a house and being rich, that’s a problem. You need to set more specific goals so you are able to be productive. Instead of saying how rich you want to be, throw in a number. Do you want to make $100,000 by the end of the year? In addition, ask yourself what kind of a house you want and when you will get it. Do you want to move into a three floor house this year and live in a mansion five years later? More specific goals lead to more specific paths, and those specific paths lead to more productivity. Specific goals give you something to strive for.
You read through this blog post word for word. Only 20% of people actually read the blog post (the other 80% stop short at the headline). If you have been reading this blog post word for word, then that means you are looking for some tidbits on being productive and asking yourself if you really need to be more productive. If you read up to this part of the blog post, chances are you need to be more productive.

Now that you know the signs that you need to be more productive, you need to increase that productivity as quickly as possible. Luckily for you, I wrote an entire blog post with 10 different methods you can use to increase your productivity. If you liked this blog post, then you are definitely going to like the other one as well.

It’s So Much Easier

August 24, 2014 by Marc Guberti 4 Comments

Easy

To watch than do.

To work for someone else than work for yourself.

To walk than run.

To quit than continue.

To continue doing the wrong things than quit.

To settle than thrive.

To get discouraged than feel optimistic.

To take than to give.

To live in despair than in happiness.

To want more than to be grateful for what you already have.

Just because something is easier does not necessarily mean it is better. We are constantly searching for the shortcuts to avoid putting in more time and effort. Taking shortcuts results in the final result not being as good as it could have been.

Working Smarter and Faster VS Working Harder

August 20, 2014 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

Work Smarter

Most people work hard. They put in all of their dedication into something and hope for the best. These people constantly do the same things every day and never bother to explore out of the norm.

Few people work smarter and faster. These people are able to get the same tasks done every day. Working hard is manually scheduling 80 tweets with HootSuite. Working smarter and faster is getting HootSuite Pro and scheduling 80 tweets with just 4 clicks with HootSuite’s bulk scheduler.

It’s great to work hard because there is dedication involved, but how can you get the same result in less time? Working smarter and faster will allow you to find more things to work hard at and ultimately be more productive.

16 Ways To Build A Big Social Media Audience From A 16 Year Old

August 16, 2014 by Marc Guberti 2 Comments

Growing a social media audience and getting the best out of that audience is so easy that a 16 year old can do it (that would be me). In a span of less than 3 years, I have been able to get over 100,000 Twitter followers, over 14,000 Pinterest followers, over 10,000 Vine followers, and I’m working on Instagram and Facebook. My audiences continue to grow as the days go by, but many people wonder how I was able to get to this point. I decided to come up with 16 different methods you can use to build your social media audience (that has nothing to do with my age. That just happened to be the number I pulled out of my head).

Focus most of your time on one social network. If you master one of the social networks and sort of know the other ones, you are going to do very well with the social network that you successfully mastered. I decided to master Twitter because it is a social network of simplicity, and now that I know Twitter Domination by heart, I have been able to continue dominating Twitter while growing my presence on other social networks.
Use the big player social networks. Even if you have no plans on using a Facebook or YouTube account, create them. When you master one of the social networks, you need to learn how to master a second social network. It’s the whole idea of being bilingual is better than only knowing one language while being trilingual is way better than being bilingual. Creating the accounts now and tinkering around with them will allow you to be prepared to master them later.
Post on them all often. It is important to post on all of your social networks at least once every week. That indicates to all of your audiences that you are active, and being active is one of the crucial steps towards allowing your content to spread on those social networks.
Interact with your audience. Interacting with your audience will allow you to build stronger connections with the people in your audience. You want to be well acquainted with as many people in your social media audiences as possible. My recommendation is to look at your notifications three times each day to see if you can interact with any of your followers.
Post motivational quotes. No matter what niche you are in, motivational quotes hands down never fail at increasing engagement. Motivational tweets are more likely to get retweeted and motivational pins are more likely to get repinned.
Post articles on your social networks. Posting articles is a great way to provide informative content that your followers would enjoy.
Post valuable content. Valuable content is the kind of content that your targeted followers would like. You can’t satisfy everyone with your social media strategy (you can’t even do that in life. Shocker!) so it is more important for you to focus on satisfying your targeted audience.
Post pictures. Social media posts with pictures get more engagement than social media posts without pictures. We are a visual generation that needs to see everything in pictures. That’s why movies are more popular than books.
Grow your presence on all of your social networks. On the social network you are trying to master, you need to build a powerful presence. However, you should also be growing a bigger presence on your other social networks. Even if you are only gaining five followers every week on a social network you are not focusing on, that is still growing.
Find patterns. Some rules for one social network will apply to another social network. That means if you become successful at one social network, it becomes easier to be successful at other social networks. Here are some of the universal laws of all social networks that I was able to find.
Be an expert in your niche. People follow the experts, not the people who have no idea what they are talking about. Telling people that you are an expert in your bio is a great start, but you need to prove to people that you are an expert with valuable social media posts and a professional picture.
Be humorous. Whenever you can, mix in some humor with your other social media posts. There are numerous examples of content going viral because it was humorous.
Be creative. If your content is creative, then it will gather attention. Creative content is the type of content that the average person could not think of. There is a difference between valuable content and creative content, but if you mix the two together into one social media post, your content is going to spread faster.
Host a giveaway. Giveaways allow you to easily bring in more followers. Some people will follow you just for the giveaway. The only problem associated with the giveaway is that once the giveaway ends, many people unfollow the host of the giveaway. Esurance is a brilliant example of this. If you want people to continue following you after the giveaway, tell everyone that you will be hosting another giveaway three months later.
Interconnect your social networks together. That does not mean connecting your Twitter and Facebook accounts together so all of your tweets end up on Facebook. Linking those two accounts together is not even a good idea to begin with. I am talking about promoting each of your social networks and their posts on your other social networks. If you have a YouTube video, promote it on Facebook. In your YouTube video’s description, have a link to your Facebook Page. Here’s a more in depth analysis of how this strategy works.
Be patient. Don’t you wish certain things could happen faster? Unfortunately, when it comes to growing a social media audience, fast is not a part of the vocabulary. You are not going to get 100,000 followers in one day. You will most likely reach that milestone years after you create the social media account. However, by sticking with it and learning new techniques along the way, you will be able to dramatically grow your following.

Those are the 16 ways to grow your social media audience. What are your thoughts on the list? Do you have any additional methods on growing a social media audience? Please share your thoughts and advice below.