Every New Year brings the excitement of a new beginning, and new beginnings offer the opportunity to better ourselves. But how many of us start strong on our New Year’s Resolutions, tapper off by early February, then, by March, yearn for next January to restart on a failed resolution? Instead of making loaded promises with no delivery, let’s use social media to hold ourselves accountable to our New Year’s Resolutions for peace of mind, body, and soul.
Fitness and Health
New Year’s Resolutions that deal with fitness, exercise, and health are one of the most popular New Year’s Resolutions. But changing your fitness and/or eating behavior overnight is no simple task, never mind maintaining a food and exercise log. Leverage your check-ins with popular social networking websites on your smartphone, such as Foursquare, Facebook, and Yelp, in lieu of a boring food and exercise log. Foursquare’s stats page lets you analyze your check-ins. Weeplaces converts your check-ins from Facebook and Foursquare into graphic visualizations of your check-ins. If you’ve been making good on your New Year’s resolutions, your check-ins should indicate more frequent check-ins to the gym and healthy grocery stores instead of your favorite fast-food restaurants
Twitter is also a great place to involve your social sphere in holding you accountable to your New Year’s Resolution – simply tweet your daily progress. Phitter is a great twitter community that surrounds you with other like-minded health and fitness enthusiast as a support group. Want to up the ante? There’s even a scale that auto-tweets your weight.
Money
With tax season just around the corner from the new year, improving one’s finances, particularly expenditures, is another great and popular New Year’s resolution. Mint.com is a great website that brings together your various accounts, like credit cards, assets, liabilities, and bank accounts, and coverts your spending trends into simple-to-analyze pie charts.
Like tweeting your weight in your health New Year’s Resolution above, you can also tweet what you spend. Tweetwhatyouspend is a great community to draw support from a like minded, financially responsible aspiring people. Tweet what you bought and why you needed it… or why it made you feel guilty.
Social Media
If you’re reading this blog, you’re probably, like us, social media enthusiasts. With so many social networking websites, third party clients, such as for Facebook and Twitter, and the many different social media accounts you might have, it can be a bit overwhelming. Here in the social media world, sorting our your social media can be a great New Year’s resolution.
If you feel overwhelmed managing profiles from different social networking sites, try using an aggregator such as Tumblr, or setting up a hub of your profiles with about.me. You can link other social networking websites to Tumblr so that when you publish something new (such as a new blog post, a tweet, or Facebook update), it automatically publishes in blog-format on Tumblr. about.me features your many profiles from all your social networking sites in one place.
Do you sometimes feel overwhelmed constantly having to tweet to satiate your information-hungry audience? Clients like HootSuite (even used by the White House) and SocialOomph help take the edge off with such features as consolidating numerous Twitter accounts and scheduling tweets in advance. Plus, with their paid version, they come with their own social media stats and analytics.
2011
Social media is the providence of the 21st century! Don’t get caught behind. Leverage it to conquer your New Year’s Resolutions and better yourself. Please share comments and stories on how you’ve utilized social media in your New Year’s Resolutions.
Written By: Jaszver Bauzon
