How do you use social media? What does social media do for you? Care to share?
There is much to love about social media. One of the things I love most about it is that there aren’t really any rules as to how you use it.
Social media is just a means of expression. Social media use is as individual as the user. You can use social media to develop exactly the voice and the rapport with the world that you want.
This is just a quick post to share some interesting quotations on social media that I’ve come across this weekend. They speak to me about how I use social media. Maybe they will speak to you, too.
The first comes from my excellent, long-standing Twitter friend Steve Browne, tweeting from a talk on social media which took place somewhere in the US (and simultaneously all around the world, via the magic of social media), yesterday (Saturday 21 November 2015):
“Don’t live your life on social… share it through social.”
The second comes from the superb book Quiet (page 63), by Susan Cain. Cain is here quoting Mashable founder Peter Cashmore, on the appeal of Twitter to those of an introverted persuasion:
“Perhaps social media affords us the control we lack in real life socializing: the screen as a barrier between us and the world. ”
Cain takes this idea and runs with it (politely and quietly, of course):
“Introverts welcome the chance to communicate digitally. The same person who finds it difficult to introduce himself to strangers might establish a presence online and then extend these relationships into the real world.”
I’ve blogged before about how I consider Twitter a perfect communications medium for introverts. This aspect of Twitter revealed itself to me only gradually, over time and tweets. Between them Cashmore and Cain express perfectly how social media can work perfectly for introverts.
I love, too, the leveling effect of social media, how social media in general, and Twitter in particular, enables you to tap into and participate in conversations with people from all walks of life and from all over the globe. As I said to Dave Ryan (in the same Twitter chat from which Steve’s quote was sourced): “That’s what is so great about social media – cuts across *all* boundaries, instantly!”
Indeed, I wouldn’t be reading Quiet right now without the recommendation from my great Twitter friend (and fellow introvert) Helen Tracey, when I had the privilege to meet her in person for a second time earlier this month – pictorial documentation of which was tweeted out to the world by the great Simon Heath. Helen describes Quiet as “life-changing.” Please give it a read.
Social media can work for you, no matter who you are. How it works for you will in all likelihood be very different to how it works for me.
How do you use social media? What does social media do for you? Do you have any fine quotations on the power of social media that you could share? Please get in touch and let me know!
- Pic at the top as taken by me, whilst walking in the Ashdown Forest a wee bit earlier today (Sunday 22 November 2015).
MJCarty 