Facebook and Twitter are a Complete Waste of Time

(MoneyWatch)  If you're in the media or communications business, you've got to love Facebook and Twitter. Where else can you get more free airplay or a better chance at going viral? As for the other 99 percent of you, every minute you spend on social media is a wasted minute you could have spent doing something that's actually productive.

If you want to reconnect with a guy you dated in college or mass-message all your friends at once, Facebook's definitely the way to go. You can also spend countless hours on activities that can only be characterized as slightly less mindless than watching TV, but none of them have anything even remotely to do with business.

Twitter's an entirely different story. Twitter is mostly about business. But if you're not getting paid for page views or eyeballs, and you're not a Gen Y personal branding guru or into some other self-promotion gig, forget it. Go ahead and tweet your little head off to your 245,984 followers, it won't do you any damn good.

Everyone seems to think that social media's some hot new business opportunity that we've all got to get on board with or risk missing the boat, but it's nothing more than a whole new way to get attention and be distracted, as in "wow, look at all those people who like me, follow me, want to know about me, me, me, me, me, --"

I don't care if you're Gen X, Gen Y, Baby Boomer, or Martian, when it comes to business, social media is a complete waste of time. And you know what? About nine months ago, the vast majority of you agreed with me in this poll:

Feeling Overwhelmed by Social Media?
51% - Yes, it's a time sink.
24% - Hell yes! I've avoided it so far.
16% - Nope, it's just a substitution for email & other stuff
9% - No way, I love it.

Those are pretty damning stats, if you ask me. But hey, I'm a fair guy. Besides, a lot of time has passed since then. So let's try it again, except this time, I'm going to change the question around a bit, just to make it interesting. So whatever your opinion of social media, weigh in:


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