Social Media Cleansing Guide
Whether we like it or not social media is here to stay, and it’s constantly evolving. Whether you choose to participate is your own choice, but a lot of times it’s difficult to escape, or you risk getting left out of events, losing touch with friends or missing a career opportunity. However, you can get on top of all your social media, all you have to do is follow our cleansing guide.
Know your media
To organise your social media you need to understand it. The social media industry is constantly growing and changing. Daniel Miller, Professor of Digital Anthropology at UCL, recently found that people use different social media with varying degrees of privacy. So, when you post on facebook for example your desired audience may be close friends, but on twitter you may alter your tone to best suit career contacts, or vice versa.
Miller also found that social media is generation specific. While many of us may be signed up to facebook, the younger generations have begun to shun it, in favour of snapchat and whatsapp, where conversations are more temporal and private.
It is important to understand the nuances of the social media you use, and whether it is useful for your purposes, rather than just sapping your time away. Are you getting anything out of your twitter account, for example? If you only use it to stay up to date on the latest news, consider instead just subscribing to a news collector website, where the reporting will be far more reliable and geared to your tastes.
Also, facebook, twitter and so forth, all make huge money by selling your personal information. You should be the one making the profit here. So why not sell your own personal data for money.
Bin it
Be ruthless. If you find that you are not really using a social media platform, deactivate or permanently delete your account. You’ll be better off without it. Sometimes it’s hard to do this, because you use the platform to communicate, and don’t want to lose that possibility. But there are ways around this.
If you are only keeping facebook because you use it’s messenger function, just download the dedicated facebook messenger app on your phone, which will stop you getting dragged into hours of staring at your newsfeed. Also try downloading the newsfeed eradicator widget, if you use facebook on your computer in google chrome.
Make a list of all your active social media accounts and write down all the ways you use them. If you find your reasons being non-essential, get rid of them. The time you will save can be invested elsewhere; why not use it to start walking other people’s dogs for money.
Declutter Your accounts
Even if you opt to keep your social media accounts, there is still a lot of decluttering to be done. First of all look at who you follow, who your “friends” are, and which pages and accounts you are subscribed to. If they haven’t posted anything of interest to you for a while, get rid of them and if you can’t remember who that “friend” is, purge them. Narrowing down your social media only to the people and businesses that matter to you, can make the whole thing a lot easier to manage.
Make money on social media
According to online classifieds site Gumtree, British households have on average £2,500 worth of pre-loved items unused and ripe for re-sale in their homes.
If you’re keeping your social media accounts, you may as well use them for something productive, and there are a lot of ways you can do that:
- Make money selling your stuff on instagram
- Become a social influencer
- Learn how to sell your stuff online
Hannah Wilson, Marketing Director of Gumtree, said: “You’ll be surprised by how much money you could raise by simply selling items you no longer use online. Make good use of your social media accounts by sharing your Gumtree listing, you never know, an old friend or colleague may be on the lookout to snap up what you’re selling.”
Go Offline
Finally, and this point is key to decluttering your mind, life and everything else around you, remember to go offline! There is often no better cure for destressing and lowering anxiety than switching off all your devices. Make some time during your day, maybe after work or when the kids are at school, or even dedicate a whole day to staying off social media. You will feel as if you’ve suddenly entered a whole new space.
