Is it Time for You (and Your Business) to Unplug from Social Media?

Welcome to maximize your social actionable 10 minute advice on how your business can maximize your social media presence. Now, the host of maximize your social social media author, speaker, consultant, and founder of maximize social business, Neal Schaffer. Hi, there this is Neal Schaffer, welcome to another episode of maximize your social. Today I'm going to talk a little bit about although this podcast is primarily on the business side of social media, I want to talk a little bit about the personal side of social media, and how it can affect businesses in the future. But let's let's stick with the personal for now. You know, sometimes, there comes a time when people will unplug from social media, or unplug from certain social networks. At the beginning of 2014, I wrote a blog post, which hopefully you all read on maximize social business where I regularly blog on six social media trends to see evolve in 2014. One of them was about personal, mobile or mobile, personal, I forget the exact term I made. But anyway, it was a term I made up. But the important thing is, and as I come back from Japan, I see the increased use of these social networks that were designed primarily for people to communicate, often talk about social media being the convergence of information and communication, right. And part of that is communication. And if you just want to communicate with your friends, sure, there's Facebook, and you can send private messages. But once you log into Facebook, it's a big complex application, you're sort of all over the place. On the other hand, in Japan, you have line in creative Kakao Talk in Chinese of WeChat. We've seen WhatsApp emerge in Europe and North America. And obviously Facebook bought them out, because I think they're aware of this as well. And in fact, Facebook is trying to push people to messenger, right? Whenever you go into Facebook, on the Facebook app, and you want to create a message, it's almost always telling you to download a separate app. Well, why is that the case? Right? And it's because of what we see happening, maybe messenger will become WhatsApp in the future, or vice versa? Who knows, right? But the important thing is, the more people spend in these messaging apps, and they bring social media back into the personal realm, the less they're spending on social media platforms, right. And some of these platforms specifically line give you a pay to play option. But for small businesses, there's it's pretty expensive, although you could start your own profile, what have you. It's very, very hard to play in that space. So I want to bring it to a personal level. Because, you know, there come times when maybe you use the social network and you unplugged. And I think it's happened to a lot of us over the past decade, going back to the days of Myspace, where maybe some of your early social media adopters were on, but probably not anymore. I remember when Empire Avenue was booming, and Empire Avenue was booming right before Google plus lon. So you saw a lot of the Robert Scoble polls and the Brian solaces. And even Jeremiah Lyon, they were, you know, they established profiles, they were a little bit active there. And it seemed like Once Google Plus launched at sort of sapped the energy from Empire Avenue, to which even today, I think they're still challenging themselves to bring back. We've seen people come on to Facebook, and many that, you know, after the launch of Google Plus have gone on to Google Plus, we've seen people come and go from Twitter, there are a few different Twitter apps that I run, one is called tweepi, that I highly recommend. And if you just do a search for people that haven't tweeted in the last 30 days, man, every week, when I do this, there's always a bunch of people that popped up as like, wow, this person used to be tweeting all the time, what happened. And this is why social media is an ever changing landscape. And you really need to be monitoring things and adopting your social media strategy on a regular basis. Now, my own personal story is about Foursquare. And those of you who have been reading my blog for some time know that I actually blogged a few years ago, why I deleted Foursquare from my iPhone, have you? And you know, I really didn't see any value in it at the time. Now, it's funny, because since then, I actually got back into Foursquare, and I got to be very active in Foursquare. I thought it was fun, enjoyed checking in. And in fact, I started to see a lot more engagement on Foursquare, people liking check ins, even people commenting on Foursquare check ins that I really hadn't seen in a while. But at the end of the day, sure. Once in a while there was a coupon. But at the end of the day, outside of that, you know, quote unquote, engagement, which I think is available in any other social network. I really wasn't getting any ROI out of the effort. And you know, it's interesting. I switched from an iPhone to an Android I went from the iPhone five to the Samsung Galaxy S for about a month. After a launch last year, and then I had some serious battery issues with the Galaxy S four. Over time, it just had way too much functionality that I didn't really use. And I had some other issues. And I really, I went for it. And I'm really enjoying the simplicity, and the eloquence of the LG G two, which doesn't have a lot of the additional functionality, which I didn't need to begin with. And I'm much more cognizant of how to manage battery life on an Android device now, but I'll tell you, every time I went to check in somewhere, because I was trying to conserve battery when I'm outside, I always had to turn my location on. And then every time I turn the Location button on or or you know, the GPS button, it always popped up, hey, you know, you're allowing Google to, you know, use this information you Okay, without or whatever it was, I always had to say yes. And it just, you know, every time I checked in and began to be this hassle that I had to pull up my cell phone, I had to put on the location, I had to check in, I had to find a location, which didn't pop up automatically, all the time. And you know, it's like, why am I putting all this effort and energy and literally battery energy into doing this when I really don't see any ROI. And I decided at that point, it was maybe two weeks ago, I was no longer gonna play in Foursquare. I literally deleted the app again, this time, not from my iPhone, but from my Android. And I really feel good about doing it, it was almost this burden that I felt that I had to do something. And that's what social media should not be about whether it's for people for businesses, right. So for people, what does this mean? Well, I go over to cloud.com, which is the way that social media influences measure through one algorithm put forward by a company, then Cloud kalo UT, and I literally disabled my connection with cloud, right? It just didn't make any more sense, because I wasn't gonna be hectic on Foursquare anymore. But I looked at all the other apps, and all the other people out there. And I'm wondering how many people are really, honestly, and authentically engaging on these networks, and how many of them are just sort of popping up their presence with content that really isn't personal, just in hopes of maintaining a minimal presence. This is something that people should not be doing. It's something that businesses should not be doing, especially when you don't see the ROI. And when you do see the ROI, you're obviously going to put in a more concerted personal well, as human as a brand can get effort into reaping the benefits of engagement on that platform, right. And I say this, because I don't know if I mentioned this in previous podcasts. But I've really had to unfollow a lot of people these days on Instagram is really the best one, where people are just like posting quotes, right? It's like, wait a minute, Instagram is a platform for smartphone users to take pictures and post those pictures. And that's it. So if you do anything outside of that, and I see a lot of quote unquote, social media experts do this. It's like, wait a minute, that's just not right. That's not why I'm on Instagram for, you know, I'm not here to see quotes, I'm here to see pictures, real pictures of people. That's why I only post an Instagram, when I'm outside and have something to post right. And if I don't, I don't post it doesn't make sense to. It's why I don't post like 10 times a day on Facebook. Without any medium. I try to make one good post a day, I mentioned to you a long time ago, I went to Facebook headquarters back in December of last year. And that was the message if we all posted every time we posted on Facebook, because there's so many users there. And you know, we all yield so much influence there, whether you have 100 friends or 500 friends or with EdgeRank. And with the way that things spread, there could spread a lot of people make every post count, create a post as if it was a love letter to someone, right. And this is just as important for businesses as it is for people. You don't need to post all the time, just post once a day and make it count, right. You don't need to feel like I need to post two or three times a day, I don't have anything to say, I'm just going to post random photos and quotes. So I've unfriended people on Facebook for the same reason. And we could talk about other platforms being the same people wanting to over post on Google Plus, because they think somehow it's going to give them more influence with in Google search results, which I don't think is the case. But that's another story. But really, you don't need to be on all platforms. And if a majority of your posts, whether you're a business or a person, or the sort of wow, we have nothing to say, but we need to we need to keep doing this a few times a day, we need to just get content and get it out there. You know, there's a problem. There's a big problem. And I think this is, you know, the same reason why personal users like myself unplugged from certain social networks. Even though as a social media marketer, I'm gonna keep my eye on whatever network that I unplugged from, you know, it's important for businesses also to realize, you know, this may be the day where we need to unplug or extremely lessens our presence in the platform because the ROI is not there. But we see the ROI on another platform, right. So that's really my message for today. Really think about, you know why you're on social media, and businesses should be thinking the same thing. But if you're not seeing the ROI from network, unplug from it. I think we've all unplugged from networks in the past. And maybe whether it's Twitter or LinkedIn Facebook or Google Plus, I don't care what it is, if you don't see the value, you unplug, I will say that I myself have unplugged from Foursquare, I definitely see myself spending a lot more time on Pinterest, on Facebook, and always on Twitter. And I definitely spend less time on the likes of Google Plus, although I'm still there, and I still along with Facebook, you know, do one thing, great post one great thing a day, but I'm not as active as I am and other networks, and Empire Avenue who some of you, you know, have become like a real big empire Avenue fan. But I'm trying to actually limit my time there. Because I really don't see the ROI, even though it's a lot of fun and very engaging. So that's it, you know, maybe some of these social networks, instead of looking on a daily basis, you can switch to a weekly basis. And I should say LinkedIn is more and more becoming that way. For me, I know there's opportunities and LinkedIn groups, I should be engaging there more. But right now on my list of priorities in the ROI, it's not as high as engagement on other platforms. So, you know, a year from now, I'm going to be talking about different networks with different priorities and different ones that have unplugged from and maybe I'll plug back into Foursquare, who knows, but it is this flexibility that people have, that you should be exercising, together with the fact that businesses must always be flexible and adapt to the circumstances. And that really is the root of what a social media strategy should look like, and how you need to adapt well into the future and cover all the unknowns that will become knowns in the not so distant future. That's it for today. That's my 10 minutes of fame. Just want to throw out something I've been thinking about something that you know, been talking about with clients or at social media events. I don't expect you to always follow my advice. But if through my speaking on the subject, you know, one light bulb went off in your head or you got inspired to do one thing. I'm really happy. That's my ROI of doing these podcasts is in 10 minutes. If I can give you one great idea or inspire you to do something that I would have contributed to empowering you to better use social media. And that's really what this podcast what I am my business is all about. That's it for today, everybody. Feel free to keep in touch and I look forward to speaking with you again, and another episode of maximize your social Bye bye.

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