I have been wondering recently whether the use of social media, and the various tools available, is reaching saturation point?
There are a wealth of social media platforms and tools now available, including email, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Xing, YouTube, Google+, blogs, discussion forums and many others. The range of interaction types, wealth of information, formats and time relevant data is, to put it lightly, overwhelming.
I have a view that we may be reaching a point where we are unable to manage, take in, process and analyse all this data, particularly where it is used for business or project decision making – are we able to cope, or are we reaching sensory overload and distraction?
The likelihood is that there are going to be many more social media tools, applications and data streams in the coming years. Are we going to change our way of interacting with this data and knowledge, or will there be new tools to help us synthesise and filter this data to our individual, team or business needs.
What are your views on this potential social media overload, and what strategies are you planning to implement to help you manage?
Having read yesterday that Google+ is opening up for organisations, and the impact that will have on the resources we currently assign to online social media, I think saturation point is a fair description.
However I believe that these tools will start to merge, rather than continue to fragment. We can see this already in what Google+ has tried to achieve with its use of circles, which (if it had the activity) would save the need for me to update my Linked In and Facebook accounts separately. Once you begin to introduce apps to personalise your experience, you start to get a sense of how a one-stop shop could work.
Now that Facebook are beginning to add the best bits of Google+, there will be an interesting battle between over the coming years.