Social networking affects work/life balance

The Twitter account connected to this column, @gkratzbalancing, crossed the 300 followers mark on New Year's Day.

My Facebook journalist page has 102 "likes."

In the world of social networking, those numbers are tiny. But from my perspective, they're kind of amazing.

I still consider myself to be relatively inexperienced in this virtual world. I've had a personal Facebook page for a couple of years now — the "journalist" page is less than a year old. I've had a Twitter account for more than a year, too.

I never intended to be an early adopter in either case. In fact, I dragged my feet quite a bit, which is why I was late to the game and why my numbers are still low. In a world full of distractions, I figured the last thing I needed were more little things to occupy my precious time.

That changed somewhat when I became managing editor for deseretnews.com and started seeing the impact such sites could have as we tried to attract traffic.

Good stories told by talented writers were — and, I believe, always will be — the things that are most important in determining whether a news story or feature piece draws attention online. However, an excellent story that, in the past, would have been popular with just a small group of local readers can now become a national, or even international, sensation, thanks to Twitter, Facebook and the like.

Having witnessed this more than once while I was still at deseretnews.com, I decided to start my own column-related accounts based on my desire to promote better work/life balance.

The irony is that keeping up with Twitter and Facebook adds yet one more task to my list of things to do, and since I'm not at the paper anymore, I have to do so on my own time.

That's why, every Monday, I find myself taking a late lunch so I can use some of my break time to check my column online and then post links to it to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+.

It's not a huge deal, but I do feel pressure to try to come up with a catchy phrase to post in the hopes that I can attract a little attention for my own pieces and make them worthwhile for the editors at my former workplace.

I don't know whether these efforts have paid off, but I have received some interesting feedback from my social networking friends and followers.