Learning Social Media in Your 40s
Ok, so I’m a bit of a Luddite. At the turn of the century, I was the last person I knew to get a cellphone. When I did finally get one, it was a flip phone, but people had already moved on to Blackberrys. After a couple of years listening to my friends rave about their Blackberrys, I got one from work, which I promptly threw in my desk drawer, and left it there to die. No way boss man, I don’t need your tethers. I was a workplace cowboy, a dying breed, preferring the old school method of face to face communication. “Don’t shoot me an email,” I’d say, “you know where to find me.” I thought technology was the devil: an odd stance for a guy working in IT.
Years later, I gave into peer pressure and got a Facebook account, but I stopped checking it after a week. From what I could tell, Facebook was simply a battle royale of people posting the most heartbreaking stories they could find, about people they didn’t know. Well no thanks to that. Life was hard enough already without having to feel terrible about what was going on with total strangers. It would be many moons before I considered social media again.
Instagram was what made me give up my abstinence. Sure, it was 6 years after it launched and 500 million other people had already discovered it, but I came around. At the time, I was really getting into photography, and I liked having a place to share my pictures. I also liked that you didn’t have to read anybody’s stupid story if you didn’t want to. You could just see if you liked their picture and not bother with any of the text. It was beautiful. No sad stories had to be read. No drama. Just scroll through the pictures and move on. Okay, I can get behind this one.
On Instagram, I noticed people were using all of these pound signs and I had to Google what they were. Oh, so those are hashtags. I still didn’t quite get them, so I asked my kid’s babysitter for advice. After trying to explain it to me several times, she decided I was hopeless, and graciously took me on as her Padawan apprentice. Under her tutelage, I learned that the hashtags in my first posts were really, really dumb, and that I used way too few of them. Overcompensating for my lack of social awareness, I then used way, way too many, which earned me more reprimands. Matt, you can’t use twenty hashtags. You need to cut that down to like five, tops. To be #instacool, I think you are supposed to use no more than four hashtags, but no less than two. I couldn’t get myself to use less than eight; I was hashtag raving mad. Wanderingmatt8 still had lots to learn.
Over time, my developing #instagame led me to write little stories, serving as a gateway drug for blogging. Now shamelessly looking for more places to plug my writing, I recently decided to dive headlong into the rest of the social media universe, hoping to learn how all of this works. If you’re anything like me — in your 40s, clueless about what the heck is going on out there, and maybe hoping to promote your business or your writing — I humbly offer this “list” of my current learnings, as a possible guide. Mind you, most of what I’ve learned is probably wrong:
1. Facebook. The mother of all social media platforms, most people still live their online lives here, so if you have anything to share, you better be here too. Not much has changed: most people are still either sharing sob stories that make you feel terrible or posting pictures of all the wonderful fun you’re not having. But I admit, after a 3-year hiatus, it’s really nice to see so many old friends on here. Oh yeah, that’s right. Facebook’s for really old people. Like total grandpas. Like people over the age of 25. These are your people.
2. Snapchat. My mind exploded when I learned you could swipe in both directions, and I became enormously frustrated that if I wanted to follow someone’s stuff, all of their content disappeared before I knew what I was looking at. It’s like getting a Hulu subscription to watch Empire, and finding out you can’t watch Season 1 because the rest of the world has already moved on to Season 4. Stick to Facebook, Grandpa.
3. Twitter. I used to think Twitter was just a newsfeed for guys who wanted to catch up on trending sports stories. Or for those who like to have their thoughts interrupted all day by Trump retweets. But recently I learned that Twitter is also where people can build an anonymous treasure trove of followers to help support their business, or, ahem, promote their blog. If that’s your bag, all you have to do is follow everyone. Scary looking dude that says he hates kids and listens to Satanic rock? Hey, he says he’s a writer! Follow. Crazy cat lady who uses all of her kitties as muses in her books? Hey, she writes books! Follow. In the Twitterverse, follows are like handshakes. Don’t overthink it. The key is to jump on relevant hashtags, so you can converse and learn with people that are interested in the same things you are.
4. Pinterest. Pinterest is like looking at the tack board collage hanging in my daughter’s bedroom: it’s noisy, there are tons of unrelated items, and a lot going on there that I don’t understand. But you better get on it bub, if you want to share whatever content you’ve got. According to Quicksprout.com, “Pinterest is the second biggest driver of referral traffic by a large margin.” Guess who got a Pinterest account this week? I’m hoping my daughter will manage it for me.
5. Reddit. Here’s where you can discuss any topic that might interest you with a host of likeminded people. Just make sure you follow the rules of each group. I couldn’t even tell somebody I thought their idea was good without a reddit bot telling me I’m “doing that too much,” and then unceremoniously blocking my posts. I have no idea what I’m doing here.
6. Tumblr. This is where I pretend to be a blogger who knows what I’m doing. I’ve created one post so far and spent most of the time x’ing out the dirty cartoons everyone else posts. I’m pretty sure everyone on Tumblr is in 5 thgrade and just discovered that the other sex exists.
7. WordPress. This is where I actually blog. This site is great. It provides plenty of templates for creating your site and shows statistics on how your site is doing. Honestly, it’s kind of like a video game for writers, where website views feel like points.
8. Medium. This is where writers connect, and apparently you can build up some clout by being on it, but I wouldn’t know, since nobody has ever read anything I posted there.
9. Mailchimp. Let’s the four people who subscribe to my website know about my latest posts.
10. YouTube. My son tells me this is where he plans to make his millions someday, performing trick shots like Dude Perfect. I’m not on YouTube. I don’t know any trick shots.
11. TikTok. Ok, just walk away. What are you even thinking? TikTok is for teenage girls posting 17,000 videos of the same dance moves over and over again, injecting creativity by rearranging the order in which they “catch the woah.” You don’t belong here.
12. LinkedIn. This is where you can find your resumé again when you’re unsuccessful at making a career using any other form of social media. I just created a new account there yesterday.
Ok, that’s what I’ve got so far. #howmidoin? And do I need a space before that last question mark to make it a proper hashtag? Doesn’t matter. It’s a stupid hashtag anyway.
Originally published at https://wanderingmattlarson.com on January 23, 2020.
