iPad Boosts Social Media Activities

Up to this point in time I feel my participation in social media has been quite fruitful. I started my blog back in January 2008 and since then it has steadily grown with thousands visiting on a regular basis. 

I've been active in Digg, Sphinn, Stumbleupon, Design Float, Mixx, the list goes on, for some time and have had a Twitter account for a couple of years. All this time I think I've done my fair share of social media marketing, sharing content, writing blog posts etc but the busier my web design business has become, the less time I've had for other things.

I realize how important blogging and social media is to my business which is why I felt the iPad would be crucial in boosting my activity in both areas. Having previously used my iBook and iPhone primarily to tweet, share content on social sites and read feeds I saw the potential that the iPad offered me.

RSS Feeds

As I've previously mentioned in my post iPad Eats Up RSS With Relish my iBook was running about as well as a three legged horse and my iPhone, as good as it is, has a small screen only suited to use in small bursts (mobile browsing!). I was using my iPhone for long periods but when it comes to reading posts via NetNewsWire it was becoming a chore:

"My iBook is a few years old now and is really starting to slow down and so it becomes a chore to start up and use. I then got the iPhone and until now used it heavily to do all things from mail to NetNewsWire to Facebook and Twitter. But being such a small screen the efficiency of reading large quantities of text is slow and laborious."

As soon as the iPad came out I saw it as the perfect device to streamline my working practices in social media, being able to consume greater quantities of information whilst at the same time being able to respond quicker by email or by writing blog posts.

Blogging

This has already come to fruition through my last three blog posts, all written on the iPad and in quick succession. My blogging was sadly down to once a month due to other work consuming my time and my desire to blog having been quashed by the effort needed to write on other devices.

Turning on a laptop is hardly an effort but with little time in the day to complete all my tasks every second counts. The ease of use of the iPad and its speed lends itself perfectly to all things social media.

Due to time restraints, sadly there's only 24 hours in the day, I deliberately reduced my social media efforts to a number of core sites and mediums including Twitter.

Twitter

I use Twitterific on my iPhone having tried a few alternatives and it works well but again the size of the screen wasn't lending itself to the amount of time I was using it for. As I like to do a lot of social media away from my everyday iMac my iPhone was taking preference over my laptop.

Now I have the iPad I'm using the dedicated iPad app TweetDeck. In portrait mode you can view two columns of information, feed and mentions, with the top third of the screen left to display either the tweet you are currently viewing or about to post.

Turn it landscape and you get three columns of information filling the whole screen, but any link, be it web or twit pic, does not work. I can understand the principle of the idea that in portrait mode the selected tweet is shown in the top third of the page, click a link and it's shown in that same portion of the screen. But considering you're more likely to use it in landscape mode to view more info at once, it's a pain to have to turn it portrait to see the linked page or image.

With the iPad I now have a more efficient method of consuming content and an increased desire to blog and participate on a number of different social fronts.

Some might say a net book could be a good alternative but that has extra capacity that would go to waste. The iPad is a great bite size chunk of technology that does most of what you could ask for and all of what I could ask for.

Related post:
Griffin Elan Passport iPad Cover
3G & WiFi or WiFi Only iPad?
Tweetdeck iPad Review
iPad Eats Up RSS With Relish
iPad First Impressions - Good or Bad?