I have three semi-active social media accounts:
- Facebook: Usage is 100% personal. I am part of several groups related to running and a couple of groups that discuss local issues and news.
- Twitter: I have an account. It’s set up to look like a professional profile. I don’t really use this account.
- LinkedIn: Several years ago I was really active on LinkedIn. It’s been a few years since that was true but I do still have a fairly well-developed profile, though I’m not really active on the platform.
I also have an Instagram account which is 100% personal and largely unused.
One of the things I want to do in 2022 is be more thoughtful about my use of social media and over the next few weeks I’m going to try and move the needle in that direction.
The Big Picture
At a high level what I want to do is clearly delineate between professional and personal social media usage and then come up with a plan for what to do with each account.
- Twitter and LinkedIn: professional
- Facebook and Instagram: personal
For my professional accounts, I want to start treating them like a job: schedule posts in advance and start trying to build a following around specific areas of professional interest.
For my personal accounts, I want to decide whether it’s worth keeping them around at all. I’m very much undecided on that front and we’ll just have to see where I land.
Next Steps
The first part of this process I want to attack is to professionalize my use of LinkedIn and Twitter. Professionalizing those accounts will involve two basic steps:
- Define what niche (or combination of niches) I want to inhabit professionally speaking.
- Set up social media management software and establish a routine for writing and scheduling social media posts in advance.
Over the next days and weeks I’ll come back to this process and get the ball rolling on becoming more intentional about my use of social media.
Funny that you bring this up as I have also been dabbling with what to do with my social accounts, which is something I tend to visit every year. Very interested to see how this works out for you, might actually get me to change the way I use my accounts too!
I tend to do the same each year, but usually it goes something like this: “I’m going to delete my accounts. Ah, actually that seems too extreme so I’ll just change my password (and not save it) and log out. That’ll keep me out for a few weeks.” Then when I finally do reset my password to get back in I go right back to my old time-wasting habits. So this is a bit of a tired trope: revisiting how I use social media. However, this is the first time I’ve taken this particular tack to changing how I use it. We’ll see. I plan to keep writing about the process and results for the rest of this blogging challenge. 😄