I have a difficult relationship with social media. On the one hand it is a channel for announcing when I have a book coming out – the reason I went back to Facebook after some years away – on the other hand it is a timesink of increasingly limited value. Over the past few years I have had presences on several platforms including Facebook, Instagram, Threads, TikTok, Twitter, Blue Sky and Mastodon, and possibly others I’ve forgotten.
This week I deactivated my TikTok and Twitter accounts. Threads was ditched some time ago; I rarely look at Mastodon. So only Blue Sky, Instagram and Facebook remain. Also, because I use Substack for occasional notes about Diabetes, I have Substack Notes which is similar to social media in some respects but primarily a way of finding long-form posts on that platform.
One of the things I’ve been pondering this week (since my illness last weekend) is the continuing utility of my social media accounts. My baseline is that I want at least some for marketing purposes, but my use cases otherwise are quite limited. As well as family connectivity, Facebook is pretty good for genealogy. I’m not sure why I keep Instagram going. Bluesky is fine as a replacement for Twitter, but I only check in every so often, with some interest but not much enthusiasm although it is a good source of current historical thinking given the number of historians and medievalists I follow there.
I’m not going anywhere with this except thinking out loud. In essence, were it not for marketing needs, would I withdraw from social media entirely? The answer is probably ‘no,’ but working out why that is the case will guide my use of various platforms as time goes by.
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