This month, i am obsessively learning about the fundamentals of social media and cranking up stuff on what is social media from a beginner's eyes. Social media is new to me. I don't know this space quite well. I never had any focused agenda for this space. To me it was like, my friends hang out there so let me also hangout. It had nothing to do with getting things done. But this space is powerful. I made new friends. I learn more stuff. I am updated about the world in general. But I have no idea how to design-fully (aka intentionally) use it ?
The ignorance of not being able to answer that question is bugging me. On a hindsight compared to 18 months ago, I seem to have more followers who do give their attention to the **** I ramble every now and then. I have no idea how to add more value and make more sense to them in a responsible manner.
A little background on where this is coming from!
I logged into my LinkedIn account only in March 2018 though i had the account from 2009 or so. Never cared about it unless until i found a purpose to help makers or builders or hustlers or designers or product folks like me and checkout if they truly have struggles in this area or is it my illusion. I had 534 connections that day on LinkedIn.
Someone advised me to be consistent, so i wrote 100,000 words on LinkedIn in 18 months. All synthesised content. No repeats. No copy paste. No trolling. No BS. I treated social media as my creative outlet. I used it to write notes to myself in public. This social accountability and shame of putting out nonsense kept me responsible and sensible. The outcome is now 15000+ folks are connected and a lot more folks follow me. This is a scary place to be.
This was going great till my work friends pulled me into Twitter saying you will do better here. I was hesitant. They bought me caffeine and took pains to educate me about Twitter. I reluctantly said "I will try".
I really tried and still trying actually. In the past 6 months I have done some exciting experiments and the results are mind-blowing. Most experiments worked against my hypothesis so I learned a lot.
A few high level learnings:
Managing social media is a full time job. You could spend considerable amount of time in this rabbit hole if you are not conscious enough.
Managing two different social media is daunting. I surely felt dejected is I could not manage LinkedIn and Twitter, so my motivation fell apart in both places. I stopped writing totally.
You make stupid decisions because of your inability and you do stuff like creating your own blogs like this following some insanely smart people like Seth Godin. Well, context matters. You create blog and again you use social media to talk about things as it is silent here. We love LIKES and SHARES though we don't want to admit.
50+ nuggets like this I realised.
My head went on a whirlwind the past 30 days. Earlier I use to just think about it in my head, reflect, go through mental masturbation and finally call it done.
For a change, his time, I want my notes to help some students of mine who are lost like me in the name of social media. I am not a super star. Not a celebrity. I don't have million followers but I do understand how this sh** works. This time i am going to create a little course called Fundamentals of Social Media based on my learnings and experiments of unplanned 24 months. I am also going to tell, how you can plan your social media and get maximum value out of it. Be it learnings or profits or personal brand or whatever. If i gear up enough guts i will make it available for others as well :)
P.S: Trying something new in my blog where I write reflections every month on all things that worked, did not work, what i am doing about it.
