31 May Social Media: Do I Have to Be There?

Social media is incredibly fraught these days and when most people ask me this question they want to hear a certain answer. That answer is, “No, certainly not, you don’t have to be there.” But that’s not the real answer (you likely knew that already).

Social Media: Why, oh why?

I love social media, I really do. Instagram is my favorite at the moment but I also love Twitter and LinkedIn. But there are reasons why I love these platforms so much:

1. I’ve worked really hard to curate them.
2. They are filled with my friends and colleagues.
3. They allow me to engage with my industry (journalists, producers, bookshops, scholars, bloggers, and authors I read and respect).
4. Social media works for me.

What these four things indicate is that I didn’t enter any of these social media platforms without a plan for how I was going to use them, curate them, and engage with the people on them. Those plans for each platform have changed over time as the platforms themselves have evolved but fundamentally they are a tool. If they aren’t a tool for you, then, frankly, they are just a waste of time.

But I just can’t Sarah!

Okay, I understand. Really, I do. I feel the same way sometimes. Social media never stops, there is always something to look at, it feels overwhelming, and it’s addictive. All that dopamine feels good until it doesn’t anymore. But, and this is a big but, social media is amazing! When done well social media allows you to connect with people you never would have imagined (media, celebrities, politicians) who can help push your work into the public eye.

We can talk about how I manage the too-much-social-media problem in another post but for now let me explain how I set up social media for new clients.

I start with a set of questions:

• What are you interested in learning more about?
• What do you hope social media can do for you?
• What information about your work would like people to most know about?
• How much time do you have each day?
• Do you have anyone to help manage social media?
• Are you connected to any organizations that have social media accounts?
• And a bunch of others.

Thinking about your goals for social media allows you to be strategic in how you set social up or how you reorganize and better utilize the social accounts you already have. You also don’t have to be everywhere. That third question allows us to think about what social networks make the most sense for finding people who are interested in what you have to say and most importantly those networks need to be a place where you go to learn things too. If it’s not a resource for you, you won’t engage with the people there and then they whole point of a “social” network is gone.

To answer that first question

The short and uncomplicated answer is, no. You don’t have to be on social media to engage with people. There are lots of real life ways to engage with others but if your aversion to social media is simply introversion expressing itself it might be easier for you to start conversations online than it would be in person. If your aversion is a matter of time, there are ways to mitigate the social media time suck. I’m a big fan of compartmentalizing and we’ll talk about other ways in a future post.

You are very unlikely to, by chance, rub elbows with a producer or a book editor on any given day but they are all on social media. If you follow them, you get to learn what they are interested in and how to connect with them. Social media lets you be a resource for people within your area of expertise and when that person needs an expert for comment, there you are, just a few key strokes away via direct message on Twitter.