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Okay, so you’ve decided that social media growth is for you. You’re committed to the process, and you’ve started putting effort into it.

But should you be doing social media at all?

It sounds like a dreadful existential question, but knowing why you shouldn’t be putting any time into it might just strengthen all the reasons why you decided to engage in the first place.

So, let’s delve into “7 reasons you shouldn’t ‘do’ social media.”

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Highlights:

00:17 – Today’s topic
00:41 – Let’s avoid “purgatory infinity”
01:50 – It’s one more thing you have to get good at
05:06 – Social media is a horrible hobby
06:30 – Social media is addicting
08:57 – An open invitation to the comparison game
10:59 – Social media may not be the solution
15:13 – Social media sets false expectations
17:44 – There isn’t a guaranteed effort-to-reward ratio
19:28 – Closing thoughts

Transcript:

Welcome to Spark Infinity Office Hours. This is David Andrew Wiebe and it is October 10th, 2024. Today’s presentation is seven reasons you shouldn’t do social media.

Do is in quotes for a reason. I’m not going to explain that reason, but if you pay careful attention to this presentation to the very end, I think you’ll figure out why I’m not here to burst anyone’s bubble, the reason Spark Infinity and this team and this group exists because we have that common goal of wanting to grow on social media. So today I’m not going to be discussing reasons to quit.

That’s not what this is about, but we need to remember that if you’re going to say yes to something, you’re saying no to other things as well. And being mindful of that choice and that trade off is really important in life. I also think it’s a really good intellectual exercise to explore arguments against whatever your chosen path is, because it facilitates critical thinking and it helps you refine your beliefs.

Ultimately, I want everyone involved, including myself, the participants or the leaders in Spark Infinity, as well as the viewers to be in Spark Infinity mode, not Spark Purgatory mode or Purgatory Infinity, that sounds even worse. That’s not what we want. We want to see and get results and to put effort into things that do get results.

So let’s move into those reasons. Number one, it’s one more thing you have to get good at. If you’re already good at several things or a couple of things, or maybe just one thing, whether that’s guitar or taking photos or programming, whatever it might be, if you’re already good at one thing or a couple of things or three things, remember, if you want to get results with social media, that’s one more thing you’ve got to add to the plate and actually get good at to get results.

Author and blogger Seth Godin was getting started as a blogger in the early days of the internet. If he had chosen to, he could have had first mover advantage on Twitter and he was considering it. He decided against it.

He saw it as one more thing he would have to get good at. Trying to get good at more things he felt would have diluted his focus. He opted to focus on his writing, thereby increasing his chances of becoming the best in writing, or at least in his category.

The term best might be subjective here, but I think Seth Godin’s influence speaks for himself. For a long time, if you put the term Seth into Google, he was the first result that showed up. May not be anymore, but he’s definitely in the top 10 results still.

And he’s probably one of the people that has influenced more thought leaders on the internet than anyone else. Ironically, it’s interesting. I don’t know why no one seems to want to point this out, but Seth is on Twitter slash X. It’s just that he’s not active on it.

His daily blog posts automatically publish to you and appear on his X feed. And in his case, that is really more than sufficient because he has a following of over 761,000 on X. I don’t think he’s going to. But if he ever did change his mind about being popular or doing well on X, he would have a pretty good foundation to stand on.

Is that going to work for every blogger? I don’t think so. I don’t think merely having your posts re-shared to X, unless you’ve built your authority and credibility and your prominence in other ways, is automatically going to boost your views or help you grow a following on X. But for Seth, it worked just fine. If he had focused on X, I don’t think he would have just 761,000 followers either.

He’d probably have many more. Key lesson, there’s actually two here. First is if you want to become the best at anything and want to have any hope of becoming the best at it, again, best being subjective, you’ve got to strip away all distractions and give yourself the best chance possible at making that happen.

Meaning you’d probably be saying no to a lot more things. So you can say yes to the one or two things that you ultimately want to be good at. And number two, and we will talk more about this later.

So I’m not going to expand on it a lot right here. There are pathways other than social media to get to where you want to go. Seth is proof of that.

Number two, social media is a horrible hobby. When I was a network marketer for about four or five years, my mentors often said this business makes for a horrible hobby and one more quote, if you treat it as a hobby, you will only ever earn a hobby level income. And I think social media really is the same way.

If you treat it as a hobby, you are never going to see better than hobby level results. So if you’re on the fence about social media, there will be pain and the pain will only increase over time. There is no pain when you’re a decisive yes or a decisive no, regardless of the consequences.

But the maybe people will suffer and so will the results. So the key lesson here is if you’re committed to growing on social media, no price will ever seem too high. If you’re deliberately and intentionally choosing not to do social media, there is no quote unquote missing out.

No FOMO, only JOMO, joy of missing out. But if you’re wishy-washy about it, there’s a chance you’ll get swallowed up in the next wave of trolling, criticism, hardship, or something else because life happens whether you’re doing social media or not. And there are plenty of things that could take you out.

Number three, social media is addicting in the worst way possible. Social media and smartphones are addictive by design. You can find many articles on Google corroborating this notion as well as many studies.

According to Addiction Help, social media addiction is growing year by year. Research shows that roughly 210 million people are addicted to social media worldwide. As I understand it, only about 4 billion people, in other words, about 50% of the population is even online yet.

What happens when an additional 4 billion people come online? What will the addiction stats look like then? Addiction Help seems to indicate that these numbers are rising year by year. Gary Vee said, social media is more addictive than cigarettes and alcohol. Yet, I have a hard time imagining anything that could leave you feeling as empty and unfulfilled.

Those dopamine highs let you down every time. I’m not advocating anyone become addicted to anything. Although, if we’re honest with ourselves, we all have addictions of minor or major forms.

I’m not necessarily talking about clinical addiction, which is a whole other thing. But I can think of other things that would have a little more payoff than staring at social media. In fact, I think that’s the lowest payoff there is.

Key lesson, if you are easily distracted by the posts you see on social media and forget why you opened the app in the first place, you are likely addicted. If you frequently find yourself doom scrolling and can’t seem to control it, you are likely addicted. The question is, and this is really key, are you a creator or consumer? My coach and anyone that I respect is pretty much in the category of a creator.

They make things, they prioritize making things over consuming things. I even heard, I think it was Ralph Smart, and I love his channel as well. I think he was the one that said successful people for every hour of content they consume, they create two hours of content.

So they create double the amount they watch. Think about that. Number four, social media is an open invitation to the comparison game.

Comparison is the root of all unhappiness. If you look up that term on Google, it seems to think I came up with it. I simply summarized a sentence that effectively said the same thing, and I’m pretty sure it was Joe Vitale who originally said that, but thank you, Google.

It’s nice to be known for something. JED says social comparison can lead to increased depression, decreased wellbeing, poor body image, and even eating disorders. I don’t know why they separated increased depression and decreased wellbeing, because if you read the article, you find out that by decreased wellbeing, they mean depression, I guess, because depression leads to decreased wellbeing.

But it seems to me, they’re kind of in the same category, either way, more often than not, we are comparing ourselves unfavorably to others, their highlight reels to our bloopers, virtually anyone you can name has gone through hardship. And if they haven’t, they will. People aren’t exempt from difficulty or challenge just because they’re rich, famous, good looking, or otherwise.

Many so-called social media influencers will tell you they don’t even know what they’re supposed to be influencing. And in fact, many of them earn an aggressively mediocre income. All these people that we’re supposed to look up to and have been told to look up to and think we should look up to that appear to have incredible, amazing lives that apparently we don’t have, have about the same lives that we do.

Key lesson, your life may appear dull compared to those you see on social media, but fundamentally their lives aren’t measurably better or different than yours, it pretty much averages out. So minimizing social stimuli and engaging in real life is the antidote to ongoing comparison. Number five, social media may not be the answer.

We get into social media for a variety of reasons, but it seems to me it’s usually because someone says something along the lines of that’s where the people are, it’s the right thing to do. I heard stories about, and that could be something like, I heard story of a guy who shared his books on TikTok and was suddenly making millions of sales. Any kind of success story, or it’s easy to go viral or it’s costly and difficult to build your own platform.

And there are a lot of false notions to dismantle within those, but chances are you’ve heard some combination or some variation, some iteration on the same things from other people, which is perhaps one of the reasons why you decided to market your work on social media. What’s the reality? The reality is social media is algorithmic, meaning it only rewards people doing certain things a certain way consistently, it’s crowded, it’s competitive, and it’s definitely pretentious, meaning there’s plenty of people pretending that their life is much greater than yours. It is certainly not the only way, and it may not be the right fit for all artists or businesses.

To add insult to injury, if you attempt to scale chaos, you will only get more of the same. Meaning, if what you’re currently doing isn’t already proving effective, even on a small scale, it’s unlikely to increase in effectiveness just because of a boost in viewership or following. This is what many of us are hoping that one day we wake up and we got a thousand new followers.

And those a thousand new followers care so much about what we’re doing that they sign up for whatever it is we have to offer, or they go ahead and buy it. If you’re not already seeing people sign up, if you’re not already seeing people buy, if you’re not already seeing people take the desired action that you want them to take, scaling that up and introducing it to a larger audience isn’t likely to get you better results. All you’ve done is scale chaos and the chaos will continue regardless of your following.

You might see slightly better results, but not by much. Key lesson. There are other ways to scale the mountain.

It’s more about what works for you versus what’s working for someone else. Critically, if you’ve long since outgrown what someone else is doing, it’s unlikely to work for you. I’ve noticed that some people are really good at certain things.

Some people are incredible at couponing. In fact, they’re so good at it. They teach others how to do it and they never pay a cent for their groceries.

In fact, the grocery store ends up owing them. Also, I want to briefly explain what I mean when I said that if you’ve outgrown what someone else is already doing, it’s unlikely to work for you. I have a friend who is quite aggressive in doing things like live streams and podcast episodes.

I see things working perfectly for him. It’s pretty amazing what he’s been able to create, but I’ve done so much of that myself that even just thinking about going back and attempting to do something like that, it doesn’t feel like in the sweet spot for me. It doesn’t even feel like it’s going to work just because I scale up my content efforts.

Suddenly everything is going to magically change and work for me. I do think a focus on other people in my audience and the people I have interviewed is far better than a focus on self. That’s one of the big things I’m realizing about creation in general.

So I’ve got a story and a message and that’s meant to be shared with others. It’s like this. So often we see people being really happy in something they’ve chosen to do.

Maybe they’ve decided to pick up the guitar. Maybe they’ve gone back to school. Maybe they bought a brand new car and we think, Oh, I want that.

But if you mistake the object for the true reason why they’re happy, they’re happy because they’re in the sweet spot for them. You got to find your sweet spot. Number six, social media sets false expectations.

This really goes hand in hand with the last point. People say things like, look how easy it is to go viral. Why aren’t you doing it? If you aren’t seeing results in six months, you’re doing something wrong.

That’s a real doozy. I’ve seen all kinds of people on X say that. And I always ask, what does that mean? Like if you started working out six months ago, what sort of results should you see? I think something like losing four pounds or five pounds might be realistic depending on what your body weight is.

I think maybe getting a little bit leaner or getting a little more muscular might be realistic. But if you’re talking about a thorough, holistic, complete transformation from skinny and scrawny to muscular, like Arnold Schwarzenegger, there’s something wrong with your philosophy. Here’s another good one.

I’m going to teach you my hashtag staircase strategy for just $49 per month. I have respect for all entrepreneurs, everyone with a hustle, everybody that has something to teach or to share others. I think that’s a great.

But me personally, and I think entrepreneurs all feel the same way. We’re not just going to respond to a long line of questioning and then pointing out our flaws and telling us what we’re doing wrong so that you can sell us your program. Entrepreneurs aren’t going to respond to that because we’re really more so show, don’t tell.

It’s about getting to the point. If you’ve got an amazing sales letter or some testimonials or credibility or results to show entrepreneurs respond to that. So anyone who’s selling to entrepreneurs, be aware of going through a longer process that maybe works for your average buyer.

It’s not going to work as well for people who’s been in the hustle. So wizards always need to be aware of other wizards, regardless. And getting back to the point, it all leads to the same conclusion.

We feel like we go and try it out for ourselves. And if I’m not seeing results, it must be because I’m a smelly, stupid, ugly old that’s destined for failure, which probably isn’t true, but like Chinese water torture, the lack of results can start to take its toll on you drip by drip key lesson to find what winning means to you and only chase that you make the rules, don’t leave it up to someone else and don’t worry about what others say you should or shouldn’t be doing or getting make your rules seven. There isn’t a guaranteed effort to reward ratio.

To be fair, this is true of most things in life, especially in entrepreneurship. There are no guarantees in e-commerce becoming a YouTuber, podcasting, blogging, affiliate marketing, or otherwise on the independent path, you’re going to be putting a lot of effort into something, no matter what, and you got to take some chances. I wanted to look into what companies are up to and what some of their concerns are, because previously it just seemed like their knowledge and awareness of social media or what they could potentially do with it was a bit of a mystery.

And I’d say they’re getting smarter, but the biggest concern of companies using social media in 2024 seems to be trying to maintain a presence on multiple platforms or figuring out which platforms to prioritize and investment. And that tells you something basically that even businesses with deep marketing pockets and budgets are worried about the same thing you are, which is the effort to reward ratio. What are we going to get for the time and energy and resources we put into it? Key lesson is you’ve got to put your time, money, and energy somewhere.

Just be sure your ladder success is leaning against the right building. Now, this doesn’t mean just because it’s not leaning against the right building that you’ve got to climb all the way down and then come back up another ladder. I think that’s what many people believe when they say things like this, chances are you might be able to jump over to another ladder because you can leverage all the skills, experience, knowledge, and talent you’ve cultivated to this point.

So right there, that cuts down on a lot of worry over failure. Thank you so much for watching. Don’t forget to follow me on Instagram.

I’m at David Andrew Wiebe, W-I-E-B-E, and I’ve got a brand new book, Kindle, paperback, and hardcover versions are available. Are you having trouble figuring out how to distribute, promote, syndicate, and market your music to bring it to a larger audience? Are you tired of trying to become a social media megastar? Are you tired of spending days, weeks, months, even years or decades of your life trying to build sales funnels that don’t ultimately work or bring you the results you’re looking for? Then have a read through The Renegade Musician by David Andrew Wiebe. Thanks for joining me.

We’ll see you again on another Spark Infinity.