By Oriol Serra
I do not know if it is just me but lately there has been a growing sensation within me to slowly disconnect from social media…Am I devolving from it?
I remember those times when Facebook came into our life…it seems like yesterday. Before that, despite some us had already started playing with My Space & few other channels , I do not think the concept of social media was embedded into our language.
Facebook brought the revolution of social media into my day to day social interactions. All of the sudden I was able to connect with “friends” from all over the world without the need to write long emails…waiting for an answer…log into sketchy chats…it was a revolution of the means for communication! I started with few “friends” (those in my email address book)…but really fast all of the sudden I had over 500 new friends! It was the revolution of friendship!
At first I surely put a lot of hours of friendship interactions in Facebook…those lazy days at home were perhaps before I would have made an effort to get out of the couch and meet somebody for a coffee, beer, walk in the city…etc turned into friendship Facebook days…
It was easy to keep with social media friendship interactions,but then…new channels started to appear! Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn…my social media interactions became almost a full time job…first to understand how each channel worked and then keep up with answering to every post, message, birthdays, professional requests…etc. It was overwhelming!
In between this, brands and these channels started figuring out how to make $$$ out of our interactions…and it got even more confusing and overwhelming! Not only I had to deal with friendship requests but suggestions of things I may want to follow (public figures, my favorite brands, sports team…) and then…I felt I was being chased! Everything I searched became a cookie that followed me all over every social media channel..I felt there was no break…constantly bombarded…the devolution began
I started reducing the amount of friends I had to those I really cared, so when somebody told me…did you see my post? why have not you answered to my message…didn’t you know I did this…? I posted a pic on Instagram about it…I would be able to let them know yes I did…or no…sorry I did not see it because… With the downsizing of the amount of friends I also reduced the amount of time I would spent in social media…and also became more selective about which channels I would interact with…it came down to two…Facebook and Linkedin…never really got into Twitter…and Instagram seems to me like the good looking superficial sister/brother of Facebook…
In speaking to my friends of similar age…border line millennial and baby boomers…those that experienced the social media revolution in their late teens…it seems I follow the trend…they are all little by little spending less but more focused time in social media… Are we evolving or devolving? I am not sure I have the answer yet…but brands will have to quickly figure it out…because the shotgun approach will no longer work…proper positioning and customer segmentation is of the essence!!
MGT 489 