Wednesday 11 May 2011

Where Is The Social Media Mute Button?

Photo: http://rayhigdon.com/what-numis-network-reps-dont-want-you-to-ask/
Sometimes you just want to pick up the social media remote and press the mute button so that you can filter out some of the posts or tweets littering your feed. Maybe you are totally over hearing about Double Down burgers. Or maybe your feed is full of tweets or posts about an event thats running or a rugger game thats playing. Or perhaps your fav TV show is screening and you don't want a spoiler on it yet. Or you've just had an argument with someone and you just want to filter them out of your life for a while.

On Facebook its easy. On any post, just click the x on the right hand side and choose if you want to hide just that one post or all posts from that person. If you change your mind (and lets face, don't we all from time to time?) just go to the drop down settings beside Most Recent at the top of your feed, and the list of your hidden pages and friends are all shown there.

This means you don't have to unfriend your friend and then refriend them if you have a bit of tiff. In fact, they wont know at all that you've hidden them - perfect.

Likewise LinkedIn has a similar feature. Bless. Although you can only hide all updates from a connection, not a single update.

Over on Twitter though, things are not so easy. You can unfollow someone which will stop their tweets from appearing in your stream, however they can still mention you (but not DM you). They may also notice that you have unfollowed them, so be prepared for that conversation. Or you can block them but that may be too extreme. You also can't filter out a hashtag or tweets with specific words - so you are forced to endure it in exasperation or abandon Twitter completely for a while.

An alternative is to use the Global Filter setting in the Tweetdeck app (thank you to the person who told me about this - you know who you are). You can select words, hashtags, a source or a specific user. No more mentions, DMs, or tweets in your stream. In fact, its like they didn't exist - blissful silence.

And you can clear the filter when you want to.

So easy! Try it and enjoy the peace that it brings.

   

No comments:

Post a Comment