However, it’s not because people are spending too much time on the platforms. It’s because they’re not using them correctly.
There’s been a lot of criticism about social media, and some of it is deserved. We spend a lot of time on these systems. According to Social Media Today, upwards of 9 hours a day, and 30% of all time spent online is spent on social platforms. The amount of time spent on these platforms has been fueled by mobile devices. And really, even when we’re not actively engaging with the platforms, w’re still connected to them, waiting for notifications to come in.
But I’ve seen a lot of articles bashing social media, when they should be offering strategies to improve the experience instead. After all, this article is being posted on a social media platform, and I don’t consider it a waste of time. While not an guarantee for success, this article includes a number of ideas of how to make social media work for you. I wish someone had told me earlier. I think I’d be a lot better off right now if they had.
Diversify and Broaden Your Network
The problem isn’t social media. The real issue is that people shouldn’t be on social media just to kill time, look at funny memes, worship cats, and so on. They should be using social media to build their own personal brand. You should try to utilize multiple social media platforms, including LinkedIn, Medium, Twitter, Facebook, and of course Medium.
Follow people that will provide information that you wouldn’t normally find. Echo chambers are great if you want to convince yourself that you’re right, but they’re not going to open the door to new opportunities. The same can be said for only following close friends, family, and colleagues. In order to build a broad network, you need to reach out. Don’t troll and don’t be antagonistic, but see if you can find communities of people on social media, with whom you wouldn’t normally interact.
Engagement
Don’t lurk. Engage. Maintain active social media accounts with content that make people want to follow you. There’s no need to spend your entire day trying to come up with interesting content, but you should do more than just look at other peoples’ content. Having a solid number of followers allows you to leverage your account. Looking for a new job? If you have a lot of diverse followers that pay attention to what you write, you can ask that community for information.
Follower to Following Ratio and Lists
One of the key metrics for social media accounts is the follower to following ratio. I don’t pay quite as much attention to it as most people, but it’s important that you don’t make your account look like a spam account. If you follow too many people, and too few people follow you, then people aren’t going to trust your account when they come across it.
While one might have as a goal, a positive follower to following ratio, odds are you’re going to have to spend many years building your personal brand before you can reach such a condition. The celebrities do it, but for one thing, they don’t need to follow anyone, because they don’t need to access or engage with people on a general basis to promote themselves. The average person does, and one of the goals is to use your social media account to find useful information.
But what you can do is unfollow unproductive accounts. If you find that an account has gone silent, if you find that the account doesn’t produce its own high quality content, and if you find accounts with similar information, you can unfollow some of them. Doing so will improve your ratio and bring it towards the positive end.
Moreover, because Twitter has lists, you can rely on building up lists, or use preexisting lists. While writing this article, I started cleaning up my own follower list, transferring some of the follows to Twitter lists, and removing others completely. Unfortunately other platforms don’t have lists, but at least on Twitter, you can do a lot to clean things up. To get you started, here’s a growing list of curated science and science communication accounts listed through FJA.
Speaking of other platforms, you should try to follow the right people on the right platform. Check to see if people have accounts on multiple platforms, and find where they’re most active. That’s where you should follow them. Following the right people on the right platform can also help improve your following to follower ratio.
Communities
In many ways, lists are a lot like communities, and many social media platforms have ways to really engage with groups of people. Facebook has actual pages and groups, as does LinkedIn. But even Twitter has hashtags, along with their lists, which creates pseudo-groups and communities. Know which communities are available and which ones can provide information that you need. #SciTwitter, for instance, is a great community for scientists who use Twitter. I’ve also been trying to build something which is similar here on Medium, a “#SciMedium” so to speak. The better you understand your network, the more you can utilize it.
Conclusion
People really are wasting their time on social media. But it’s not so much that they’re spending too much time on these platforms. They’re just not utilizing them properly. While it’s great to have some leisure time, and surfing through the internet for funny memes, cat pics, etc is great, we should try to use social media to further build our professional brand. In doing so, we turn what could otherwise become an addiction into work that generates value for us. After all, Medium is a social media platform, and many authors leverage it as a way to generate real value.
