Slim – Social media for busy people. Slim discovers the important updates from your Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn so you can save time and never miss out again. Slim Alerts is a powerful method of filtering your social networks by specific keywords. For example, real estate agents can receive updates about their friends talking about moving; TechCrunch calls Slim a “good way to stay on top of what’s happening, even when you haven’t had time to check yourself”.

Golden Bridge Awards: Are people spending too much time on social media? How much is too much time?

Yair Levin: Who has time to balance work, family, commute and play on top of monitoring 1,000+ people on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, etc.?

Active social media users are reaching a burnout stage from trying to keep track of all the activity on social networks whether their primary use was for business or pleasure. A recent Pew study reported that two-thirds of Facebook users needed to take a multi-week break because they were dissatisfied with the type of content (or updates) they received.

Since 2006, the amount of time that the average person spent on social-networking sites has more than doubled, from 2.7 hours to 6.9 hours per month. More people are using social media, as well. While only 24% of Americans had a single social-media profile in 2008, 56% of Americans do now. The average Facebook user spends almost 7 hours each month on the site. The average visitor to Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+ spends half an hour on the site per month.

About Yair Levin

Yair Levin leads the PM team for financial products at Gusto. With over a decade of experience building financial products, Yair is passionate about creating innovative solutions to make small businesses and employees more prosperous. He lives in Marin County, California, with his wife, Hannah, and their two kids Dalia and Asher.

Golden Bridge Awards: What’s the best way for busy people to manage all the different social media profiles they have?

Yair Levin: Users need a way to aggregate and filter all of the information they are receiving on their various social media feeds. Slim is simplified, no-nonsense content – we like to call it “fat-free social media” – so our users never miss out, saving time and avoiding dissatisfaction.

Slim is the perfect tool for active social media users who need a “safety net” to ensure they don’t miss an important update from one of their networks, to the infrequent user who just wants the highlights from social media. Finally, the business user who has little time but wants to stay aware of opportunities and reasons to get in touch with friends and clients.

It takes me two minutes a day to find out what’s happening on the social networks with certainty that I’m not losing any important information, and I have 600 friends on Facebook, 1,000 on Twitter and 500 on linkedin.

Golden Bridge Awards: Do you feel there’s a certain sense of social media burnout from having to follow too many feeds?

Yair Levin: The Information Age can often feel like the age of information overload. With most of your social and business circles present on multiple social networks, there is a flood of information coming your way every day. While a great deal of this information is purely for entertainment value, a significant portion of what’s being posted is very relevant to your business needs. Filtering through all the social media noise and finding what’s important to your future success is becoming an increasing challenge for the average working professional.

Golden Bridge Awards: What are the pros and cons of social media?

Yair Levin: Here are my inputs:

Pros

• They allow those with similar interests to connect and converse.
• They allow professionals to network more easily.
• They allow businesses and public entities to share information with customers and clients, and to market themselves inexpensively.
• They allow people to reacquaint with old friends or those who live far away.
• They provide another option for those looking to date but are unable to find the right person.
• They allow for grass-roots causes to organize, recruit new members and spread their messages.

Cons

• Online interaction can become a substitute for actual meetings, which can hurt social development and isolate users.
• They waste time, especially for those who compulsively check or update them. For employers that means lost productivity.
• They let bullies spread destructive information, photos or lies about others.
• They give hackers an opportunity to steal and misuse personal information, especially if users don’t correctly install privacy filters. And even with those safeguards, posted information is never fully secure.
• They can be costly to those who post regrettable information or photos that are discovered by colleagues or prospective employers. Once information goes online, it never goes away.
• They bring out the nastiest conversation, because participants feel anonymous, or at least have some distance from those they are insulting.

Company: Slim Labs, Inc., Larkspur California, USA

This article was published in Golden Bridge Awards when Yair Levin was at Slim Labs, Inc.