Social Media Values

It happened around the beginning of the 12th grade. I thought to myself if this was a feeling that I exclusively felt or was shared by many. I began to wonder why I was spending so much of my time on the web browsing the profiles of individuals I rarely spoke to. Gradually I began to cut down my friend lists to people I actually talked to and cut of the people that were more of acquaintances than friends. My Facebook friends list dropped significantly. That wasn't the end of it though, I now began to wonder why I wanted to browse the profiles of individuals at all. Most of the time the things that appeared on their profiles were not things that correctly reflected who they really were in person. I made the executive decision and deleted my Facebook account (deactivated till delete began available). 

The problem wasn't that my profile poorly reflected who I am, but more because I didn't have a guiding force in terms of what I put of my Facebook page. I didn't realize the impact of social media sites on the way people perceive you, and most importantly the kind of trouble it can get you into (Facebook significantly at the time). More often that not friends and people I didn't know began to get into conflicts due to things that came up on their Facebook page. Other times when you meet an individual in person they are nothing like the way you thought they would be from their profile. People seemed to be loosing their filters.

Now Twitter on the other hand is something much more up my alley for several reasons. One, because of the simplicity of the user interface. Navigation of the site couldn't arguably be simpler. Two, the character limit only allows individuals 140 chances to say unnecessary things (which has be proven to be more than enough). 

There was an article sent to me by my aunt that has been a guiding force to the way I use my social media sites (Twitter is my only active social media site). It talks about the importance of building a personal brand and how social media sites play a pivotal role in your brand building process.