Recently, I realised that Twitter has been my go-to social network for over a decade, but I rarely go on it now. When I do, I remember why I started to pull back from it when Elon Musk bought it, although the signs were already there – I wrote about it during lockdown in The Twitter Abyss.
Social media doesn’t have the same hold on me it had previously, especially when it felt necessary for promotion/marketing and building awareness around my work. Nowadays, my posts’ reach and/or engagement doesn’t feel as significant as it used to. A part of me feels we are at an inflection point where social media isn’t what it used to be, but what comes next is still unknown. It feels like a state of limbo.
I spend hours trying to figure out how to approach promoting my book, my podcast, and where to share my thoughts. Plus, whether there is a place for my random opinions. Perhaps I should embrace this next stage of my life, in a bubble, clueless about what’s what and who’s who, outside of my spheres of interest.
I joined Threads when it launched and signed up for Bluesky, but often forget to log onto them. When I log on, I never really know what to post. With LinkedIn, I am erratic but have only ever really used that to share thoughts on work, etc. When I post on there, I get decent engagement. I spend more time on Instagram than on any other social media platform but generally consume more than I create/post.
Guy LeCharles Gonzalez’s post Not-so-random pandemic thoughts on Author Platforms reminded me of my own site. Every year, for the last couple of years, I start with the intention of getting back to blogging, even if some consider it outdated.
I start the year with good intentions and then overthink it to the point where I don’t post anything. The beauty of Twitter for me – I still childishly refuse to call it X – was the ability to develop and share my thinking in a manner that needed to be concise and clear.
The internal debate now is that, since it – and other platforms – don’t give me that outlet any longer, why not use this space to do so without worrying about length, SEO, etc?
Plus, I have been toying with writing a collection of essays and the random thoughts on my site would probably help with that endeavour.
This is all very open-ended and simply me thinking ‘aloud’.