Social Media has gotten anti social

When the first social media platforms were launched, Myspace, Facebook, Bebo (lol) I was there. As such I have both existed in a world where I had to arrange a time and a place to meet my mate and pray they would be there and be able to track exactly where someone is on Whatsapp. 

The point I’m making is I’ve seen platforms come, go and most importantly, the evolution of those platforms as society adjusts to their existence and potential. 

Over the last HALF DECADE I have made it my business to make social media A business. That means, unsurprisingly I’ve spent a lot of time on the internet watching the way social media usage has changed, impacted lives, certainly become more venomous and, on many occasions, lost its way. Social media has become anti social.

Allow me to explain.

We are all monkeys. 

That means, fundamentally, anything we do other than try and eat, sleep and reproduce is unnatural. Granted, we are fairly advanced but our technology and means have far outpaced some or our key brain functions, notably our primal need to interact with each other in small to medium size groups.

As a species, we are not designed to spend the huge amounts of time some of us do behind a keyboard obsessing over likes, what our ex is up to or chucking abuse at some footballer for making a gaff. 

We’ve lost sight of what social media should be and how it can be used for good and to help our business communities evolve.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m still a huge fan of what the platforms bring us. The creativity we see on “new” apps such as Tik Tok or the ability Twitter still has to bring real time news and opinions to timelines all around the globe is incredible. I just think, surely in 2020 and given everything that has happened to this point in just 3 months of the year (at time of writing), we should be thinking rationally about how to use social as socially and commercially astutely as possible. 

It baffles me that in an age where we know drinking too much is bad for us, smoking gives us cancer and the cheeky girls should never have formed a band, we still have businesses who don’t use social to reach an audience. And most importantly, we all, personally or professionally, focus on vanity metrics such as likes, views and dare I say it, engagement. 

Social media has well and truly become anti social. It’s about the me, me, me when it should be about us, us, us.

Stuart is a x2 finalist for his social content in 2019 and a nominee in the 2020 world blogger awards. He knows a thing or two about creating socially engaging content with honesty and a purpose. Talk to him about your social media needs.