THE LIFESTYLE ENTREPRENEUR

Read time - 3 minutes

Social Media Usage

After a bit of a break, I’m slowly ramping up my social media content and presence and how I use it is top of mind.

I also have 15 year old twins and an 11 year old with an iphone, so it’s double, or quadruple top of mind.

We’re almost 20 years into life with social media as a mainstay in our lives (the iphone launched in 2007). Usage since that time has gone from 5% of the population before the iphone, to 70% now, according to the Pew Research center.

During that time social media has gone from a cute way to see friends’ baby pictures and cat videos, to the primary way we get our news, entertainment, and a primary way we spend our leisure time.

At this point we all know too much social media is really bad for our brains. but is all social media bad? Most reasonable people would say no. There are many positives about the sites, like:

• Greater access to information

• Fluid communication with anyone in the world

• Ability to share your thoughts to a large audience

• Access to communities that can’t be found in real life

• Access for disabled people

• Crowd-sourced news and fact-checking

I could probably keep going for 5 or 10 more bullets with benefits.

The cons are also lengthy. In some ways access to 4 billion people around the world is a pandora’s box that can’t be closed - all the dark corners that always existed are now accessible to us, and our children.

In addition to the above, social media has a powerfully addictive effect on our brains. Most of us, myself included, are unable to manage it unchecked. It’s powerfully addictive nature is why many people will make a blanket “social media is bad” statement.

I don’t agree with that any more than I agree that cigarettes, sugar, and alcohol should be made illegal for humans. I generally believe we should be able to do what we want and it’s on us to regulate our urges.

And for social media, I think it has qualities that make it worth using for most people, with a few important caveats.

Here’s how I think about social media usage, followed by a few tips for making it work better for you.

Time on vs engagement

One way to think about your social media usage is using a 2x2 matrix with time on social media as the x-axis, and engagement on the y-axis.

Time on is self explanatory - the more you’re on the further to the right

Engagement means how much activity do you produce on social media? Do you make posts, comment and interact with friends and community? The more the higher on this matrix.

The above visual shows 4 categories of people:

• The lurker - people who spend little time and also don’t engage much. This is a low risk area, if you’re not on social media you’re not exposed to all it’s risks.

• The doom scroller - This is a high risk category. Being on social media for long periods of time without interaction is likely to breed addictive behavior and potentially harm your mental and physical health (physical because it’ll kill your sleep).

• The social butterfly - This person is on often and also interacts with others heavily. While I personally believe this is much healthier than doom scrolling, there’s obviously the risk of spending too much time for optimal health and time online taking priority over work, family, and social engagement that is important.

• The producer zone - This person is active with creating content, interacting, and engaging with others, while keeping their time online to a minimum. This is the area I aspire to stay, because I believe it allows the most productive use of the sites.

This belief is based on spending the past few years creating content daily, and adjusting my activity level as my life needs evolve. What I find over and over again is that no social media use at all isn’t ideal or realistic for me, so the right amount of activity and time online is important to manage.

Through much trial and error - I find having purposeful online sessions that involve posting moderate amounts of content, and engaging regularly with others in my network, during time-limited sessions on the social media apps, to be optimal for me.

Everyone’s sweet spot will be different here, but everyone can find it with the right amount of reflection, and trial and error.

Other ways to make social media work for you

Above is a high-level framework for managing overall use. Here are some other ways to make my social media usage healthy and beneficial for me:

• Tightly manage your algorithm - your feed literally follows the concept of “garbage in - garbage out”. Meaning it reacts to everything you click, engage with, search for, and who you connect with. If you want quality content that uplifts you, makes you a smarter and healthier person, then make sure to engage with and follow people who help with that.

• Set a “one-action rule” before getting on - this means before you get on an app you have to complete one action. For me it’s simple, I get on linkedIn around the time my daily post goes live to engage with my friends and people who comment on my post. The other occasion is to check and reply to DMs. If you don’t want to post content, you could have a rule that you start with your favorite educational creator and learn one thing before you can look elsewhere.

• Set specific time and app limits - Your iphone allows you to set specific app limits, making it easier to stop each day. I also recommend a screen shutdown time each evening at least an hour before bed, ideally two.

Social media is so powerful for me I have to apply strict rules around usage to keep things manageable, and even with these rules I STILL slip and have to reset regularly. I like taking a high level approach to my strategy for usage (the 2x2 matrix is a great start), followed by applying specific tactics to manage it each day and week.

Hopefully this will help you manage your own usage.

Talk to you next week,

Mike