I know a lot of people who are boastful about the fact that they are not on certain platforms. Some people don’t like the politics (who can blame them?), some don’t trust Mark Zuckerberg (I’m not one of these people), and some just don’t want to be bothered. I’m not writing about TikTok because it’s ownership is Chinese, and any Chinese company is subject to the whims of the CCP. And if you aren’t distrustful of the CCP then you should probably do some research.
Until recently I was not active on twitter. The main reason is I could not figure out how to make money on twitter. I’ve tried paid ads and I’ve tried organic posting and never had much success. Since we had success on FB and IG I made it a point to learn those platforms as a user.
But recently I realized how much I was missing by not being a twitter user. My Marketing Director would know when there was an issue on Facebook before it happened to us, and would have some idea of what others have done. I have colleagues in a slack group that are much better connected to interesting people that I’d like to know because they are active on twitter (although I will say I’m more of a social media lurker than poster).
So I’ve upped my twitter consumption lately, with an eye on following a subset of people who I want to follow. I’m pretty sure I’m going to mute anything politically related, though.
On instagram I’ve learned a ton about fitness and basketball, almost all of it brought to me by the algorithm after following a few accounts.
Facebook is a great way to keep in touch with friends and family as well as neighborhood groups. Messenger is better than texting because I don’t need to know the number, I just need to find them on Facebook.
The point is that although there are costs to each of these platforms, there are tremendous benefits as well. It seems odd to be gleefully ignorant of them.