Why I Deleted All Social Media (Even Though I Work in Digital Marketing)
Here’s a dirty little secret about all those cable TV home improvement shows.
Nobody’s watching.
And the contractors are getting gouged by those cable TV networks.
Here’s what a source in the TV industry told me. Many of the “flip this house” style TV shows are only getting 2,500 views per episode on cable TV.
That’s nothing. I’ve picked up a million views on YouTube before, and I’m not particularly good at (or focused on) YouTube.
The reason these shows survive is because the network gets a piece of the contractor’s profits from the house flips. It’s great for the TV networks, who make money off of real estate without any risk.
But for the “stars” of these minor shows? Not so much. They take all the risk, earn a meager salary from the “reality star” part of their jobs and lose a chunk of their profits in the event of a really good house flipping year.
If the money isn’t there, why does anyone do it? Well, they like saying they’re on TV, even if the show’s audience is smaller than the live attendance at many minor league baseball games.
These shows are a classic case of the ego overriding reason. And the whole mess of a situation closely parallels why I realized I chose to leave behind social media.
THE “MISSION DIFT” OF SOCIAL MEDIA
In the spring of 2004, my campus was eagerly anticipating the rollout of “the Facebook” for our school. Nearly two decades into the social network, most people have forgotten about the early days of the planet’s largest social network, when services were rolled out one campus at a time, and the public couldn’t join. An email address ending in “.edu” was a requirement, and Facebook had to “choose” your school to opt in.
I was thrilled. I’d done a year at jr. college, warming the bench for much more talented basketball players and making a handful of “lifelong” friends along the way. Only…they weren’t.
The year was 2002, and after I transferred due to an athletic-career-ending-injury, I started to lose contact with my old teammates from Blackhawk Jr. College. This was back when porting a cell phone number between carriers was cumbersome, so many people just didn’t bother. Email addresses also changed semi-frequently, as user chased after new and better features. (Note: this ended with the debut of Gmail. I’ve had my main account for 16 years).
Facebook solved that problem. As my friends graduated and scattered throughout the country, we had a stable, reliable platform to stay in touch.
In the early days of social media, there were a handful of unspoken rules:
- Don’t friend request someone unless you have a face-to-face relationship.
- Keep it as a place for friends. Coworkers and casual contacts need not apply.
- Have fun.
Regarding number three, there was certainly a negative “brag book” vibe to social media in the early aughts, but people didn’t utilize the medium to scream anger and hatred at the top of their lungs.
Fast forward to 2020…those rules are no longer even distant memories.
Facebook isn’t a place to go to be “social.” It’s a place to go to be…pissed.
That original mission I wanted to utilize the “tool” of Facebook for (to keep in touch with friends as we moved around in the early stages of our careers) has long past it’s expiration date.
I wasn’t seeing the personal pictures and stories of old friends. Instead, I was bombarded with rage bait from everyone from a guy who I met at a tech conference to the brother of a guy one of my friend’s is friends with. (That’s a complicated sentence, but a more complicated reality).
If Facebook were a party in real life, I would have gone home long ago, preferring a night of video games and ice cream to the dull rattle of hateful monologues.
But because it was on my phone, and it was a habit, I stuck around and moped my way through years of social interactions that ranged from flatly uninteresting to insomnia-inducing to to heated arguments that flared up.
Then one day, it hit me. I could just go home from the party.
I deleted Twitter and Instagram completely, and deleted all 3,500 Facebook friends except for my wife.
BUT…WHAT ABOUT WORK?
Yes, I still manage social accounts for my job. That’s why I still have a Facebook login.
Yes, I still “work” in social media. But just as I don’t need to deliver a baby in order to work on an email to nurses for my day job, I don’t need to scroll endlessly and engage in exhausting debates in order to understand the consumer behavior of social media.
I can (and do) log into social media accounts on a regular basis, but minus the habit of seeing my regular content, the addiction is broken. It’s like I’m a former smoker who kicked the nicotine habit just by taking the lighter out of his pocket.
THE FALSE METRIC OF “REACH”
Unless this post pops off on Medium, a max of 85 people are going to read this thing.
I put up a post on the “big three” social networks asking people to join my email list. Out of, 5,000+ social connections, 85 signed up. To play the other side of the argument, the posts were up for less than 24 hours.
Those 85 people are a far cry from the “reach” of Twitter, where I’d reguarly leave “impressions” on 250,000 people (I believe this just means somebody scrolled past my tweet).
My lunch hour is up, so I’ve gotta run for now. But, to put a bow on it, social media just wasn’t functioning as “ the tool” I’d originally wanted it to be (a way to keep in touch with old friends) and there are now half a dozen better options anyway (Marco Polo, Voxer, a bevy of direct and group chat apps like Telegram X and WhatsApp).
To go back to the TV analogy, social media felt like a premium cable package with 200 channels. But instead of choosing what you wanted to watch, the algorithm picked channels for you, and increasingly leaned towards content that would produce a strong reaction (like fear or rage) to keep you from turning off the TV.
Once I realized what the game was about, I turned off the noise and walked away.
