Using social media for a purpose

Been a while hey! Clearly I haven't been updating this site and most likely no one's looking at it. That's all good! We'll get there one day!

However, there's one thing I have done is to be a bit more cautious on what social media apps I use. Let me explain:

I've been on pretty much most of the social media platforms. Whether that's X, Instagram, Threads, Bluesky for a bit, Facebook (Settle down, I'm an early Zoomer) and probably others. They're great tools especially in the current digital age when it comes to advertising yourself or your product. But on the contrary, it is a heavy consumer tool and whether we like it or not, we've all been consumers at some point on these platforms. You see it's a trap you want to make sure you get out of ASAP, because it will lead to wasting time.

But, I've realised a way to get rid of some of the wasting time aspect. Have a purpose!

Now when we sign up for these services, we might have the right intention but if you don't ask yourself why you're using it, you will end up losing a lot of time. Possibly months and years.

Sure, you can go try them out, but in my experience, give yourself a time limit such as 2-3 months to see if it fits well. I've tried X for 2 years and I've realised it's not the medium I would want to pursue as a creator.

The moment I've started posting videos on YouTube more often (Ah I need to get back to that as well) and see how much I enjoy the process, it clicked in my mind that my focus should be on a platform like this.

Now sure, you might have these distractors saying "Don't put your eggs in one basket" and I was one of them (Immature me) but at the end of the day, we all function differently and we gotta start somewhere.

And that's another point, social media is filled with distractions, whether it's for consumption, seeing people achieving their goals, hyping you up for a trend, you will end up wasting time on not finding your potential rather than discovering what you enjoy and can make it work.

So if you're stuck, what should you do?

Well here's what I did and I hope this could lead in to a direction on what you can do (Again, everyone's approach is different) - I started off by deactivating or removing the accounts I didn't need. I've had more followers on Threads but I've still deactivated it because it's not the platform that aligns with me.

This may seem daunting at first, but for me, it was a great opportunity to label a purpose for a service. Messaging on IG, Potential opportunities on LinkedIn, searching restaurants on FB (odd, I know) and uploading content on YouTube.

One of the platforms that was (and is) hard to let go was X (Formerly known as Twitter). I've invested more than 2 years on the platform and you get all the real time updates but eventually you realise that you don't need all the up to date info and there are alternative sources. Maybe I will go back from time to time but hopefully deactivated straight after using it.

And honestly, so far, it feels like the weight off my shoulders have been lifted. I can focus on what I need to do and for each social media application, I have a purpose. No more content scrolling and forcing yourself to fit in. Build your own pathway for what you want to do!

I've talked a fair bit but I hope you found this article helpful! Thanks!