Quitting Social Media - a podcast by Ugo Cei and Fabrizia Costa
from 2018-03-23T10:07:20
Yesterday on my facebook stream I kept seeing this video shared and it’s a video where photographer Dave Morrow talks about, giving up on social media, essentially quitting and deleting his facebook, twitter and instagram accounts. Quite ironically I discovered that by using my facebook account. So if it hadn’t been for facebook I would never have known about this. But anyway, I’m digressing.
So what’s Dave is saying is that he had a huge following combining all those channels. He had like a million and a half followers there and he was using that following to drive some traffic to his website. But at some point he decided that that was being toxic to him. I mean he was wasting too much time chasing likes and follows and so on, for the sake of it and interacting with people, responding to comments and so on. And he realized he basically had wasted three or four years of his life, chasing those dopamine rushes as he calls them, like that instant gratification that can last for for a few minutes, but then there’s nothing left after that.
So, not being one to do things a little bit at the time and one step at a time, he just decided to cut everything off and to use the time that he had left from that to create more content for his website, longer form content, to do more video blogs and to go hiking in the wilderness, which is his real passion. And of course taking photos while there. And of course his fear was that by completely deleting accounts, he’d lose all those followers, the traffic to his website would suffer, which in fact maybe happened for awhile. But then he figured out that by creating better content, more interesting content, longer blog posts, that he would recover that traffic and in the long run his traffic would actually grow and people would follow him because they were interested in what he had to say on his website and on his youtube videos.
So in the end, he said he’s very happy about that. It’s also interesting that this video was a shared multiple times when we are at the time when there is this huge scandal about the Cambridge Analytica firm that was harvesting data apparently illegally, using facebook user data to maybe help some politician’s campaign and so on. So people are thinking of deleting their facebook accounts for precisely that reason, which again I find reasonable. So am I going to delete my facebook account? Well, for one thing I have never been addicted to facebook or other social media. Yeah, I just spend a lot of time maybe looking at my stream and being annoyed at how useless it is, but I still use it to organize events, to do a little bit of promotion and especially to keep in touch with people that I would have to find another way to keep in touch with.
I mean, it’s so easy to use facebook for that or twitter or instagram or whatever you prefer or even google plus. So I’m not deleting it just yet, but if you want to delete your facebook, instagram, twitter accounts, that by all means do it, especially if you’re concerned about privacy. But there’s one thing which I think is important to underline here, especially if you are using facebook and other social media as I am and as Dave Morrow was, to promote our photography, to promote our photography business, to get clients who would like to buy our images or our video tutorials, ebooks, photo tours.
And the thing is that if you want to drop that, you need to find other ways like Dave is doing by writing more content for his website, not enriching somebody else’s platform but growing his own platform, that’s his website. And I think that’s something that many people might miss, especially if they don’t watch all of the 11 minutes of Dave’s video, is that if you drop facebook, you drop instagram, you drop Twitter and you drop messenger, but all you do with all that time that you have left is binge-watch netflix series, then that’s not going to benefit you in any way. Yeah, I mean, OK, it might not be as toxic as some facebook environments have become nowadays, but you’re still not benefiting your growth, your business and your audience. I’m talking here exclusively from the point of view of somebody who wants to have an audience. I mean, if you’re not interested in having an audience then please disregard what I’m saying. But if you want to have an audience because you are an artist and artists thrive on audiences, then just dropping social media and substituting it with Netflix or TV watching is not going to to do you any good. It’s only going to harm you. So Yep. My personal commitment from today on is to stop paying so much attention to my facebook stream.
I already don’t pay any attention to things like twitter and instagram to be honest, but I still do pay attention to facebook. I’m going to cut that by quite a bit and I’m going to use that time to write more content for my website s or even to record more episodes for this podcast, like this one. This is going to be difficult because things like facebook are such a huge distraction. So I’m going to install, well I actually already installed on my phone and on my chrome browser here, a little app that is called Forest, which is kind of a game. Basically, if you start the forest app on your, on your phone, it’ll take up the screen and you set the timer, like say 25 minutes and you’ll say for 25 minutes: I pledge not to use other applications, not to be distracted by my phone, whatever that is.
And at the end of the 25 minutes, you’ve got a little tree. You can do the same on the browser. You can block certain sites, facebook, Gmail, Instagram, Twitter, the news, whatever, and you can focus on a task and you set the timer. And if you don’t access any of those sites for that time that you set, then you’re going to be rewarded with a tree and then you can grow the forest over time. And you can also play with friends, who gets more trees. in a week or so. You can do contests so it can also be a little bit of fun. So I’m going to start to use it and actually have just started a little Forest timer while I’m recording this. So I will be gratified with a little tree at the end. I don’t know if this is going to work, but at least the I’m willing to try.
So, I think we all need to be more focused. We need to be less dependent on, on social media and instant gratification and recover some time out of that. But it’s important that we think how we want to use that time. We want to create more interesting, more valuable content, a because at the end, it’s the value that we provide to our audience, to our listeners, to our readers that keeps them following us. And in the end, if you’re doing this for commercial reasons because you want to make a living then you need to nurture your leads, your followers. So that in the end they start knowing you, trusting and liking you and in the end, they will become your customers. That’s the whole game after all.
Links
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Further episodes of Closing The_Gap
Further podcasts by Ugo Cei and Fabrizia Costa
Website of Ugo Cei and Fabrizia Costa