Why Bother with Social Media?

By now, you should know that I care about you and won’t sell you pipe dreams. This chapter is about social media because I think you should engage in it to further amplify your influence online. But social media is not a bed of roses. There’s a dark side that’s worth contemplating for a moment.

Social networks, Facebook in particular, have been all over the news lately. They possess an enormity of data about us, and that data hasn’t always been guarded with due care. Data breaches are a privacy nightmare when the one holding the data knows everything about you and your family.

Privacy concerns aside, many believe that Facebook has acquired too much power. Enough power, in fact, to interfere with and sway national elections, affect the collective perception of right and wrong through political biases, and even run psychological experiments without consent.^[117] While writing this chapter, the news broke that Facebook even used a research app to collect mobile data from teens.^[118]

The argument has been made that (along with Google) Facebook contributed to dismantling the business model that made journalism viable, on top of making us, somewhat ironically, more depressed and lonely.^[119]

In the past, trusting Facebook backfired for many companies. They promoted their Facebook page instead of their own sites (including in prominent ad campaigns featured during the Super Bowl) under the assumption that they could always freely communicate with the audience who liked (a.k.a. subscribed to) their Facebook pages. Not long afterward, Facebook changed its approach to requiring people to pay to fully reach their own page subscribers. It was within its right to do so, but it clearly had a bait-and-switch feel to it that left a bad taste in many marketers’ mouths.^[120]

Mind you, I’m not picking on Facebook (which, while problematic, I also find useful as someone with friends and family around the world). Twitter has its own challenges too. Many believe it’s far too lenient with radicals who should be booted off the platform, while others feel that it tends to stifle free speech far too often. Regardless of your stance on the issue, even ignoring politics, it’s undeniable that conversations on Twitter often devolve into the online equivalent of high school behavior: cliques, name-calling, and bullying very much included.

Many find it both useful and stressful at the same time. Paul Graham even asked the question, “When you meet people who don’t use Twitter, do you tell them they should try it out, or do you say, ‘You’re so lucky. Don’t start!’”^[121] and generated some good takes on the issue in the replies.

So why do we want to bother with social media at all? For all its negative aspects, there’s still a lot of value that can be captured if we approach it with the right business mindset. In fact, within this chapter, I’m not advocating for or against using social media at a personal level. That’s your choice. Instead, I’m recommending how to leverage this important channel to further extend your professional reach.

It’s a massive oversimplification, but I like to think of this in terms of push and pull. For the most part, when you publish content on your blog, people will find out about it through a pull process. They have a particular question, they’ll search for it in Google, and your blog post might just happen to be one of the first results for that specific query.

Social media allows us to engage in a push process. Our account or page will have some followers and we’ll seed the content to this initial group. If the group members engage with it to some degree by liking it or sharing it, the followers of our followers will be exposed to it. It’s a network effect that can make us known to people we wouldn’t normally reach otherwise. Some of these people might like our content enough to start following us, subscribing to our newsletter, and so on.

When other people discover us through the pull process (say Google) and decide to share it with their followers, we’ll still benefit from the potential network effect. If we have a social media presence on the given social network, however, the person might also tag us, directly or indirectly suggesting to people to follow us. It all adds up to a bigger following over time.

Another underrated advantage is connecting and building genuine relationships with influencers within your particular niche. On Twitter, in particular, they become quite reachable, and interacting with them isn’t uncommon.

Realistically, I think your biggest risk is spending too much time on social media. After all, it’s intended to solicit as much use as possible by design. Provided you can stick to the plan below, however, I think it’s a worthwhile endeavor that will complement your blogging activities.