Good or Evil?
I don’t know about you but I have a love hate relationship with social media.
On a personal level, I love being able to keep in touch with friends, find inspiration, learn new things and also promote my business. But I also hate the way it can make me feel, how addictive it is and the negativity it can produce.
That led me to think, is social media actually a force for good or is it just evil?
Social media can be an incredibly creative space where you can lose track of time watching tutorials for a new project or finding out information about something you didn’t know. If you come to it with the right kind of energy and follow the right people or businesses then it can give you an inspiration boost and really motivate you to do something you want to do.
It’s also a space where you can keep in touch with friends and family on a more regular basis than our busy lives would allow if we were only to meet face to face. After living through a pandemic, that’s even more important than ever as we all know what it’s like to feel isolated. We’re pack animals really and having that small level of interaction can give your mood an instant boost.
Plus it’s an incredible place to grow a business and get it to thrive. It’s the digital shopfront and, as consumers get younger, it’s only going to become more important.
On the downside, social media can be a breeding ground for comparisons. It’s easy to leave feeling like you’re not enough when you see what everyone else is up to. This is something I struggle with, I often find myself thinking “why doesn’t my house look like that”, “I wish I could afford to do that” or “my body never looks like that”. Being aware of those thoughts is really important and making sure you reframe them or think them out more clearly is vital to ensuring you don’t spiral into negativity.
It’s also very easy to be led astray by false information and take a quick headline as the complete truth about a topic when actually it’s just a business trying to grab your attention in a very noisy crowd. There’s a lot more to this topic that I’ll go into another time but social media companies need to do more to stop the spread of misinformation and ensure that content isn’t damaging to the user’s mental health. But as business owners we have a responsibility to only post things that are true, honest and positive for our audience.
So what’s my actual viewpoint? Well to be honest I think it depends on how you use social media as to whether it’s good or evil. Yes I’m going to sit on the fence and no it isn’t comfortable.
If you use your channels as a place for positivity to ensure you’re enriching your audience’s experience then it can be an incredibly powerful tool. You can build an amazing community who will support your business because they believe in you and because they feel valued by you.
But if you’re using your reach to make people feel badly about themselves or to spread information that isn’t true just to line your own pockets then you’re not on the right side of this argument.
As with most things in life, with social media you get out what you put in, so please use it in the right way and share those positive vibes. It’ll have a better longer term benefit for your business, trust me.