Food. Water. Shelter. Clothing. The basic necessities of life. Now it seems we have to add Social Media to that list.
When I first started my blog the only other social media platform I used was facebook. Previously I had been part of the MSN generation (never MySpace) but this quickly petered out when Mark Zuckerberg hit the scene.
I reluctantly joined twitter to help promote my blog and signed up to LinkedIn and Google+ as another way of ‘getting the word out’.
After registering and then de-registering an account on Instagram I rejoined a few months ago when I relaunched my blog in order to make my homepage more aesthetically pleasing with lots of colourful photos.
Tumblr never quite caught my attention and as for snapchat, WHAT IS THE POINT?! Pinterest doesn’t do it for me either but I’ve signed up anyway and created a few boards because hey, you have to get with the times.
To save time and energy, I link up all my social networks so that when I post for example a blog article, it can automatically be published on facebook, twitter etc at the same time. The perfectionist in me though rarely uses this helpful little tool as I often like to manually post article links with different headers and explanations.
I know some bloggers who use social media everyday, several times a day and I have absolutely no idea how they can keep up. I try my best to not let the social madness control me and tend to only post something once a day (on any platform – either a blog post or an old blog post or a retweet) and rarely at weekends.
But the fact is, keeping up with social media takes time and energy and anyone who uses the internet as a means of promoting themselves or their business has to invest in it in order to stay relevant.
I will admit that I still can’t get the hang of twitter. I try to use hashtags in my blog posts and tweet to people or companies who may relate to the content but on the whole I don’t really like it. Some people use twitter as their daily news feed but personally I find the feed pretty confusing!
Still, it seems to be a requirement nowadays to plaster ourselves all over the internet if we want to be taken seriously. You want to be an author/blogger/actor but you don’t have a facebook page? WHAT ARE YOU THINKING?
Despite all the power that the internet has given me and the fact that it has allowed me to realise many of my entrepreneurial dreams, I often lament the days when the word ‘Facebook’ didn’t even exist. Sometimes I feel like Dr Faustus – who made a pact with the devil, selling his soul in return for knowledge and power…
Does anyone else feel this way?
If not, then please do connect or link with me on the following:
It’s all too much; I agree! But I am 68 years old.. do have a computer,a tablet and regular old fashioned cel phone.. no smart phone! I like to sit and type my emails and search the internet on a nice size screen w/ a regular size keyboard.. I don’t need to be in contact w/ whoever everyone must keep in constant contact with 24 hours a day! Life isn’t simple anymore.. but I believe it’s going in a very dangerous direction.. and too bloody fast.. I know I know.. I don’t do yoga. I don’t hold a phone to my face all day and night.. but I read, listen to books on cd in the car, love on my dogs, Penelope and Pandora, aka the PP girls.. and now am surviving about 30 inches of snow here in northern Virginia with my wonderful husband. Being retired after many years of working gives us time to enjoy but still we must be careful and not be blown away by too much.. too much of too much.. Stop and listen to the birds.. hold those you love close.. not just on the phone.. please.. yassoo!!
It’s me again.. eowana… I do enjoy Facebook.. what a delightful way to connect and at your own pace.. photos to old dear friends.. it’s the constant phone in the faces that annoys me.
Author
Totally agree Eowana. Thank you for your comments! 🙂
I’m entirely with you. I find social media a drain and I’m not entirely sure it works for me. Maybe I just don’t like it! Twitter especially seems to be very full of hard-selling individuals who say nothing of interest but are always selling their wares and to be honest I’m more interested in getting to know authors as people or even friends than just their latest book… especially when they pre-programme things so that tweets come out every few minutes all selling me stuff.
Real stars of the art don’t sell endlessly, they make statements, take quirky photos or make political points… maybe even just tell us where they are going today but they don’t sell their latest movie or sports game or album or book.
I know you have groups on Twitter but even though I grouped lots of people, my feed is still cluttered so I don’t get to see the people I am interested in at all. Facebook is similar but I know there you can remove notifications of the postings of various people.
It all seems a bit shallow to me and a big investment of time which could be better put to writing, reading or watching paint dry. I think because I have such a low opinion of people selling to me, I feel really bad about selling to others so primarily I write and hope people find my work with minimal involvement from myself!
Author
Hear hear Stephen!