I like spending minimum time on social media, but I still want my accounts to look like I use them occasionally. Yet if I'm not careful, it's easy to spend too much time on social media and then wind up wasting time that I would have preferred to put toward other fun things. I actually do a lot of my social life in real life, catching up with friends or talking with neighbors. Comparatively little of my social life is on social media. In fact, I could probably do away entirely with social media, but it's handy to be able to let people know how they can contact me there if they need to.

Many people use Facebook, Instagram, etc to keep in contact with friends and family across the miles. I don't even find it that useful for that purpose, because different friends and family are on different types of social media, so not everyone is on the same platform. For that situation, I prefer using a private photo sharing service, such as Cluster, and I simply invite the people I want to see the photos (usually just the extended family). While pretty much none of my relatives already had a Cluster account, I found that they overwhelmingly responded to my invitation because they knew me personally and wanted to see my pics. The way that this saves everyone time is that it's not like traditional social media - it's private, so you're only going to see the pics of the person who invited you. You don't get sucked into reading "news" or clickbait. It's just the pics you signed up to see. Done. Also, the whole world does not get to see them, which is perfect. I don't need a stranger looking at pics of my birthday party! There are many other private family photo sharing services besides Cluster and all have different pros and cons. Cluster is the only photo sharing service I've used, but it could be worth trying different ones out yourself for comparison before sending out invites to the one you finally settle on.

Another thing I do to save time on social media is to do the absolute minimum to make my accounts look active. Meaning I log on about once a week or so (sometimes more often; sometimes less), and put in an update and maybe 'like' one other person's update, and call it good. At first, coming up with the updates was frustrating and seemed time-consuming. I debated quitting social media altogether. Since I don't use it, it's quite reasonable, but I figured it would be best to keep the accounts in case I do want to use them more one day without having to start over from scratch. So, to solve that problem, I checked out some social media status generators. I like this random status generator for women. It's safe and family-friendly, so I like that I can get a Facebook or Twitter status that I can relate to and is upbeat. There is a similar status generator for men here (also safe).

I can simply copy and paste the text from the status generator for women to create a Tweet, for example. Then my Twitter account looks active without the effort of having to come up with something to say.

In this way, I've come up with strategies for minimizing my time on social media while still being able to keep up the connections that are meaningful to me.