A few days ago, Shana from Social Desire blogged about how social media was becoming an obsession and consuming more of her time each day.

Unfortunately, she is not alone. Many people are spending insane amounts of hours bookmarking pages, reading and subscribing to RSS feeds, writing blog post after blog post, sending messages to their network, digging, stumbling and tweeting compulsively, and are losing sight of what is really important: taking care of your business and your personal life.

Here are a few pointers to nip this disturbing trend in the bud:

1. Choose Life:

Some people are staying up until the wee hours of the morning fiddling with social media and getting four hours of sleep or less. Sooner or later this will catch up with you, as this quote from an article in the San Francisco Chronicle states:

A study of almost 7,000 Alameda County residents, over a nine-year period, found that people who routinely slept six or fewer hours a night had about 70 percent higher risk of dying than did people of similar age who slept seven or eight hours a night.

You can read the full article here.

The next time it’s three o’clock in the morning and you wonder if you should go to sleep or stumble a few more pages, go to sleep. Choose life.

2. Social Media is Just a Tool:

A few weeks ago I wrote about three of the biggest Internet marketing time wasters. My friend Ramit also had a few things to say to those who spend more time checking their site’s stats than creating value.

Social media is just a tool in your promotional arsenal and not an end in itself. If you find yourself devoting 80% of your time to social media and 20% to actually working on your business, it’s time to stop and reverse that trend.

3. Stop Preaching to the Choir:

One problem with social media is that by the very nature of the tagging system you end up hanging around like-minded people most of the time.

This can be good at the beginning, when you need to establish yourself in your topical community, but later it becomes counter productive: most of these people are your peers and competitors, not necessarily your customers.

Take a look at your social media routine and make sure you’re not spending a lot of time with people that are not your target customers.

4. Pick Your Battles:

Each social media and social bookmarking site has its own audience.

Digg’s is predominantly male, between 18 and 24 years old who prefer unusual news with catchy titles. Facebook started as a hangout for college students but is now becoming more mature. LinkedIn’s audience is mostly professional. Stumbleupon users are highly targeted but tend not to spend a lot of time on your site and usually don’t click on ads. Sphinn works well if you are in the Internet marketing field.

There are many niche social bookmarking sites that can be effective, but only if your site fits into a very well defined niche.

Rather than targeting all social media sites, experiment with several of them at the beginning and then focus on those that produce more traffic and better conversion rates.

5. Use the Gym Workout Approach:

If you’ve ever worked out at a gym, you know that personal trainers recommend that you to work on your upper body one day, and on your lower body on another. They also recommend to rest every other day or so.

You can use the same approach in your social media campaign: write blog posts and bookmark pages one day, research posts and send messages to your network another, read blogs and subscribe to RSS feeds on another, etc. The idea is not to do everything every single day.

Also, remember to pick one or two days a week to work out, spend time with your family, and don’t do anything Internet-related. Don’t worry: the world will not come to an end, your blog won’t disappear and your readers won’t jump from the tenth floor.

If you liked this post or find it useful, please sphinn it or stumble it. And then, please go to sleep.

Tech Tags: social+media blogging internet+marketing stumbleupon sphinn facebook digg

Del.icio.us / Digg / Stumble it!

Subscribe