My love hate relationship with social media

When you work in a communications type role (by this I mean, a role where you utilise social and traditional media channels as part of your employment) scrolling through various tweets, Facebook and insta posts can become a chore and a bore. It is work and something you have to do therefore it becomes forced and less ‘fun’.

I have multiple accounts and handles or avatars that require constant switching between. The odd post under the wrong identity occasionally happens as a result. And I am paranoid about this happening (no one wants to post a selfie of themselves in the beach from a work account, or worse).

In the past I’ve used Hootsuite to track activity across all channels on a handy dashboard of ever updating live information, but I found combining personal with work accounts distracting, and led to spending too much time looking at friends’ posts when I was supposed to be monitoring political news and current affairs (as that’s my job).

Monitoring success and tracking stats at work is interesting but if you start applying this to personal accounts you will always be disappointed.

I have had significant social media training which means that I should know what I’m doing and feel guilty when I don’t. I tend to go through spurts of interest in upskilling leading to peaks and troughs in my activity.

And lets face it, there’s just something inherently narcissistic about telling everyone (you think is paying attention) about what you are doing, where you’ve been or what you’ve bought. Some might say shallow.

On the flip side, social media, particular Instagram, gives me a creative outlet in a job that can often be repetitive. And let’s face it, political monitoring often is as exciting as it sounds. It also creates opportunities for reaching out to people that normally would be inaccessible, and lets me voice my opinions and give feedback.

As we all have different facets to our personalities, social media allows us to be different people at different times, exploring different personas. Perhaps I want to be a professional networker one day and adventurer the next. Social media keeps things interesting.

Some days I do think about having a bout of abstinence from it all. If I see one more post from so and so about their perfect life for example… surely they can’t be that happy, busy or fulfilled all the time…? Hashtag fatigue anyone?

And then I wake up the next morning, grab a coffee and start scrolling again…