Organizing my social media contacts for MeWe is something that I’ve really wanted to do for a while. I tried on Facebook a time or two and gave up. I collected friends and contacts like they were going out of style–and then really didn’t know how to connect with or even keep up with all of them.

Why this is necessary:

On a platform like MeWe, where–aside from the Home feed–there simply isn’t much info on who in my circle is posting or interacting, finding a way to organize my contacts is a matter of necessity. This is especially true if I want to make my investment of time and effort a success. I’ve also invested money (I’m paying for a page and I’m a Premium member), so that adds another incentive.

Since I had some free time this past week because of Thanksgiving, I decided it was time to tackle this project. I have nearly 400 friends on MeWe, and I am (I admit) horrible about keeping up with all of them. There had to be a way to break this list down into bite-sized chunks so I could discover who is active online and interested in interacting and who is not, and better focus my attention.

Steps to Organizing Social Media Contacts:

1. I opted for transferring this data to OneNote and opening a new Word doc. (You could also use a Word doc for the first step if you don’t have or use OneNote)
2. Then, I created a table with six columns and multiple rows.
3. In each cell, I pasted a contact’s name and photo. This took forever, but I wanted a photo directory for my contacts with images large enough for me to really get to know their faces. (The teeny tiny icons on social media are always so hard to make sense of, especially for someone who needs glasses).
4. I saved it, and then saved a copy and removed all the photos.
5. Then, I selected all, copied and pasted the table into Excel,
6. In Excel, I left the top row and first column blank for labels.
7. I added columns between the columns of names, and labeled them Active Y/N.
8. The other columns are labeled Monday through Saturday.
9. I had 65 rows of six names each. Doing the math, I divided the list by four, because every month has at least four weeks and some have part of a fifth.
10. This gave me sets of 16 names per day for three weeks and 17 per day for most of the fourth.

Now I can add new names to the list as I make new contacts. And, because I’m making a note by each name as I check who’s on and interacting, I can focus on really getting to know my friends.

Note:

I decided that it wasn’t necessary to put this list in strict alphabetical order. As long as I consistently add new names to the list, which day they appear under in my chart won’t make much difference.

Now that I’ve organized MeWe, I can organize my contacts on Gab too. I can even add them to the same Excel sheet under a different tab.