Keep Your New Year's Resolutions Using Social Media

Whether you're looking to make a big change, or just tweak a few little things, the new year gives you the perfect opportunity to reflect on your behavior and resolve to do better going forward.

Of course, it's one thing to say you want to tackle a typical resolution like get in better physical shape, get in better financial shape, of like many of us who work on the web - get your social media presence in order. It's another thing to actually accomplish those big, broad goals.

SO this year, instead of making your goals big and broad, why not take a page from the web world and use analytics to pinpoint the specific stuff you want to change? And, by the same toke, why not use data tracking to hold yourself accountable for keeping all those resolutions too?

Physical:
Try keeping a food and exercise log. Foursquare actually lets you see your entire check-in history and, if you do a quick search, you can find it so you can easily see whether you're really been going to the gym or frequenting your fast food runs.
Similarly, there's a site called weeplaces that lets you turn your Foursquare, Facebook Places and Gowalla check-ins into graphic visualizations.
Google Maps also lets you search your own history, so you can get a visual reminder of the places you've been searching for and start picking up on trends in your own behavior.
Then, once you establish things, you still need to track those changes. Apps like LoseIt, Weight Watchers and LiveStrong let you log calories you eat and calories you burn via your smartphone. Fitango prescribes personalized plans to help you get in shape, and gives you a forum for sharing milestones you meet with your friends. Similarly, Phitter is like a fitness-focused Twitter stream where people share weight loss tribulations and tips to help keep each other going.

Money:
To help you get a fresh financial start, you should turn to a site like Mint.com. Mint aggregates all of your various accounts, including credit cards, bank accounts and assets, and then turns your spending habits into easy-to-read charts and graphs that show you where you're spending and where you could be saving. It even lets you compare your shopping and spending habits with other people in your area, so you can see how you stack up.
Once you've nailed down how your money is going out the door, you can start figuring out ways to keep ore of it in your wallet. Again, this is where tracking will be key to actually keeping those resolutions. First, you can establish your financial goals via an online calculator, which lets you figure out exactly how much to start saving. Once you're figured out your goals there are more than 50 great, free mobile apps to help you track your spending. On Facebook, the BillMonk app will help you keep better track those tricky situations where you're sharing a bill with your friends, and you need to make sure everyone knows what they owe. XPenser lets you record your expenses from any divide, including via tweet and e-mail, and TweetWhatYouSpend gives you a forum for sharing your expenditures with everyone on Twitter, so your friends can help hold you accountable when you blog your budget shopping those post-holiday sales.

Social Media:
Since you're reading this blog, you've probably already established yourself in the social media world. However, there probably are changes you can make to your profiles to better your social media presence.
Turn to Top Words app to figure out the topics you talk about most on Facebook. Klout tells you which topics you talk about the most on Twitter, and all sorts of other stats that will help you pinpoint what it is about your social media presence that you may want to change.
BackType analyzes your Twitter profile and tells you what percentage of your tweets are replies, retweets, links, etc. Like Klout, it also tells you who you're influencing and who your influencers are. And, it shows you your most shared sites.
Finally, ViralHeat gives you in-depth analysis of the sentiment around your various social network profiles, which really lets you hone in on how your social media behavior is being received by your followers on Facebook, Twitter and across the web.
If your resolution involves blogging more often, there are plenty of apps to help you do that on the go, right from your phone. Another way to remind yourself of things you want to blog, tweet or post about is by using a service like TwittRemind, which lets you tweet yourself reminders to do things throughout the day.
Once you've established what you want to change, set up alerts through ViralHeat, Klout, BackType and Google Alerts to track all the activity around the various topics you want to cover.
To make the most of your many profiles, consider setting up a hub page via a service like about.me, which lets you showcase all your profiles in one place. Or, sign up for a social network aggregation service to make it easier to make changes on all your profiles at once. You also might want to consider setting up a targeted Twitter list of friends and followers who can help you hold yourself accountable and focus your social media efforts so you can minimize the number of relationships you're managing and maximize the return you're getting from all these changes.

Happy New Year 2011!