Best Advice: Social Media

As many of my fans know, I’m a social media native. I’ve been on every platform since Myspace. I didn’t have a chance to do Friendster, but if I had, I would have been there. I had a really homoerotic custom html background on my page and one of the more interesting things I did was starting setting up accounts for business and having them garner attention on Myspace. I saw the potential of social media from the early days but thanks in no small part to youth, an inability to build a platform like this one, and a simple lack of skill in marketing myself. I was still going through the “hiding” phase of my career where I always thought that a brand would be more powerful than myself. In any case, I’ve lived my life through the lens of social media by posting, adopting new platforms quickly, and living the public space that is social media. At least as we’ve come to know it in it’s current incarnation.

This advice is for anyone looking to change their relationship to social media and for people who might actually want to start engaging.
It’s a great time to be doing either because Social Media is in a kind of flux.

For myself, I’ve had a rather tortured relationship with social media. The Facebook app comes and goes on my phone. I commit to only checking Facebook a few times a day but my habit of once in the morning and once at night quickly ballooned to much more. As it would turn out, I don’t do much else online. I read the news, cruise Youtube check out Medium/Reddit, and Facebook (which I just used a verb, take that Google). In fact, social media is so ubiquitous in my life that when faced with a dearth of Facebook posts during my recent travels I struggled to think about what else people do online. Go ahead, try to think about what you do online for non-work or financial related tasks. I’ll wait.

It’s pretty stark. Once you’ve cut out the other tasks, it gets pretty slim fairly quickly. In my bored moments in the evenings when my writing juices had simply run out I wasn’t in the mood for reading. I was in the mood for some nice scrolling. In that way, social media for me has always been that time filler. In line at the credit union or over lunch (especially as someone who often eats alone)  Facebook has been there to fill in the gaps. But now that I’m trying to be more open to those gaps and reduce my tie to social media I’m learning to day dream, watch videos that I’ve been meaning to watch or actually read literature (now there’s an idea, a writer reading literature!). However, if you’re looking at changing your relationship with social media in the new year then here are a few tips and tricks that you may find helpful.

Twice a day

This means committing to only checking social media twice daily: once in the morning, once in the evening–that’s it.

“But what about messages?” You ask. Remember when we had email that we could only check at home or on Wi-Fi before it was brought to the phone in a big way? Unless you owned a Blackberry, you remember what that was like, and it will be ok. You can reply to everyone at once and avoid time-wasting conversations about the Kardashians or Making of a Murderer.

Deactivate Some Profiles

I read in a vapid comments section that “deleting your Facebook is the I-don’t-watch-TV” and to some degree for many people to act like they are better than everyone else they have a valid point but there are some services you can just leave behind. Are you really using Instagram? Is anything gained from Snapchat? How often do you really post on Twitter? If you want to deactivate Facebook; I don’t blame you, just don’t brag about it to everyone and don’t post about it before you do it, just ghost.

Clean-Up

I am guilty of this as well, but often our social profiles get filled with pictures and stuff that may no longer be relevant. For those of us that have been on social media since college, those pictures of you partying with bottles of alcohol (yes, me too, don’t judge) may no longer be in harmony with your position in education or finance or wherever else you find yourself. Sometimes, if you’re going to keep your profiles up and stop incessantly checking them, you need to freshen things up a bit. It’s ok to delete those pictures. Especially if you download them first for your own historical archive.

At first it might seem daunting. What do you do with all that spare time? How do you fill in those gaps in your day? What are you going to…do? For some of us, there is plenty to fill the time. And it will be tough at first. I remember the first time I deleted the Facebook app from my phone. Not only did I feel free for the first time since 2008 but I also felt this weird emptiness like I was missing out on something. FOMO is real, it’s true, but fear not because that feeling soon passes and when you do your twice-a-day check-in the posts will feel special. It won’t be just another notification. That digital stuff will actually mean something to you. And that is what makes all the difference. My relationship with social media has been totally changed and the same magic can happen for you. But first, you have to let go.

The saying is true: if you love it, let it go.