My love-hate relationship with social media has returned.
For the last two weeks, I estimate that I’ve spent at least two or two and a half hours on various forms of social media per day. What a waste of time!
However, as I’m catching up on posts from my travels, property journey and jewellery viewings, I’ve found myself uncontrollably doom scrolling through Instagram and Pricescope (online jewellery forum). My desire to share content is the gateway drug to “catching up” on the lives (and increasingly, businesses) of others.
It’s time I looked deeper at what I want to use social media for, and to come up with a strategy that means I achieve my goals without going down the social media rabbit hole.
What is the purpose of social media?
Academic articles argue that social media has four main uses (”SLIM”):
- Sharing: content from yourself to others (publicly or privately)
- Learning: content from others to yourself
- Interacting: or ‘engagement’
- Marketing: promoting and selling goods, services etc
What are my goals for social media?
First and most importantly, it’s a visual diary. I want to curate and remember what happened in my life. My memory is terrible and it saddens me that I can only vaguely remember all the wonderful travels I’ve been on, or the tasty meals I’ve had, or the great times I’ve spent with loved ones.
Second in terms of importance, it’s about building a profile – especially on my property account. This is my chosen vocation and I want to demonstrate my expertise, my learnings and how I can help others in their journey.
Digging into my property profile further, I am NOT looking to grow my following to offer consultancy services etc. That takes up too much time and I want to focus on our own portfolio for now. However, I want to demonstrate a visible track record so that when I am ready to launch a property business, I have the evidence to back me up.
Jewellery profile: I am currently undecided on whether I want to grow my jewellery account. I have vague notions of reselling fine jewellery but am not particularly dedicated yet. This is more of a passion project and taking advantage of mispricings/arbitrage in the market, rather than a vocation for me to work on. Indeed, the four pieces I’ve justified buying to ‘sell on’ are staying in my personal collection for now, hah.
Lowest importance is to keep up with the lives of others. Why do I say that? It’s because the frequency with which people post is NOT correlated to how much I care about them. Indeed, there are lots of loose relationships where I see multiple daily updates (and spend TIME on their daily updates), and not much content from people I am close to. Luckily I don’t get FOMO and rarely compare myself to others (”comparison is the thief of joy”).
Therefore, the argument that I ‘should’ use social media for these loose-ties interactions is weak; if they are important enough to me, I would catch up with them outside of social media.
How should I proceed with my social media habits?
Clearly, there is a ‘need’ for social media in my life. However, that ‘need’ should not be taking up so much time, so much mindspace.
These are the rules I want to set for myself:
- Only go onto Instagram or Pricescope when I have something to say, not just to kill time. Use my Kindle or FT app to kill time if necessary
- Do not go onto social media to ‘check in’ on interactions, how many new likes or follows there have been etc
- Move interactions off Instagram to Whatsapp, which has a far better correlation of who I care about
- Use the ‘Screen Time’ function on iPhone to lock Instagram after 30 minutes of use; and only by entering passcode can I regain usage (previously I didn’t need to enter a passcode so it was very easy to ignore the screen lock function)
The amount of time I spend on social media will change depending on my needs so I don’t want to set a hard-lock specific amount of time on it: I may be travelling on certain days only, or have property updates on other days etc.
In conclusion…
I want to use social media as a visual diary and to build my profile in property (and jewellery).
I do not want to use social media as a way to catch up with friends (because Whatsapp / Zoom are much better).
As such, it’s more of a one-way interaction (from me to the world, rather than multilateral interaction) where my focus is on the ‘sharing’ aspect of social media.
