The Social Experiment

November 2015 · 4 minute read

I’ve never really been interested in social media, I guess it comes down to the people you surround yourself with and what interests they have. But now that I’m having so much fun online it’s time to start getting social too, this is also beneficial in terms of work at the moment because I’m in charge of marketing at the restaurant and the biggest free tool we have? Social Media of course. It’s crazy to think how it’s almost taken over our lives and how it’s completely changed the way small businesses have to operate. These days, if you’re not on social media then you’re not in the game, in fact you’re not even waiting on the bench. I miss the days when people actually went for a walk down the street to see what’s changed or what’s new but realistically I don’t even have time for that. As I now maintain two different social media profiles, my own and the restaurant, I have been looking to see what the differences, benefits and disadvantages are across different popular media platforms. Now, I’m a nobody online and people don’t particularly like me because I’m not particularly sociable but I wonder if it’s still possible to grow a network with people I haven’t met yet and maybe find others who are like minded. To be honest, I prefer to communicate through technology rather than face-to-face anyway so it might work out.

I’ve always had a facebook account but never really used it much. Now I’m branching into new media accounts and here’s what I’ve found so far…

I started a twitter account not that long ago and decided to keep it separate from facebook, I’m looking for a different online community. A geeky one, focussed on IT where I can find more people who share a similar interest in that way and where I can find resources to help me with my goals.

On twitter your window of opportunity is significantly less than facebook, you really need to be checking in regularly to keep your followers entertained, like every 15-20 minutes. If you leave it too long you’ll lose followers. On the other hand your potential for reaching new people and groups is larger due to the fast paced and less personal community. Also, there’s a lot less rubbish on twitter. It’s far more informative.

After posting my first blog article “How i became addicted to code” to both twitter and facebook, it instantly got some reads from unexpected people in my network and a whole lot of really positive feedback. I was pleasantly surprised at that result as I’d expected maybe 2-3 likes at best. 1 hour after the post, 18 likes & 10 comments, not bad. 4 hours later and I was incredibly surprised at the people who had liked and written positive comments on my article – that was not expected from some people who have grown to know me in a different way and for different reasons.

5 days in and social media almost drove me completely crazy. Twitter is so demanding, you need to be all over it all the time. Sitting at 70-72 followers, for every follower gained another two are lost. You have to really hammer it all day, every day if you want to stay on top and new content is key to keeping followers interested. Although, by now favourites are starting to exceed followers… People have particularly liked the working example along with tutorial tweets for setting up a rails apps and anything related to showing examples or learning about well-known languages and frameworks.

FB on the other hand, I’ve limited visible posts here to non-technical articles as they weren’t really getting a response anyway. Likes, shares and comments, however, seem to be at an all time high and now that I’ve started with social media I can’t help but keep looking at it. ALL. THE. TIME. I’m pretty much addicted to it. The only thing that really REALLY drives me crazy though is that I manage two different social media personalities and the photos all stem from instagram so every time I want to post something I have to log out of FB, Twitter and Instragram as one personality and then log back into all of them as the other and once the post is out swap back again. That’s kind of messing with me. Maybe someone should write an app to integrate them all! Or, instagram could allow posting from desktop… It’s 2015, life shouldn’t be this difficult and I’m pretty sure other people like to keep their business social media separate form their personal accounts too.