Why is social media important? Is it important? In our eyes social media has transformed into a tool for communication and advertising, that seems to have plenty of benefits but also devalues the connection between people in general. Many people just use social media to just kill time when they are bored and like the attention they can get from comments and likes. Some are starting a business and need a platform to showcase their brand, the reasons as to why people are using social media are endless and unique to fit everyones needs. In my opinion, social media really started to take off and become a significant part of peoples’ lives around 2008, but I’ve noticed a huge jump over the past 3 years. More than ever, there are ads, bots, sponsors, and endorsement deals that have made their way into the apps we use everyday, and more business-like tactics seem to be coming in the future, not to mention all the algorithms that go on behind the scenes. What really annoys me about social media today, is the total “fakeness” it represents, the fact that using a hashtag in your description brings on instant likes because the account is run by a bot, takes away the authenticity of what “social” media is. Sure, posting with a hashtag helps someone out there in the world find what they are looking for, but having bots like and comment on a certain hashtag for you is so stupid. The entire point of social media, Instagram for example, is to create a community of people, sharing their photos and videos with an audience who can either like or comment about what is being shared. By paying someone or something to do this for you and automating the process, the result is comments and likes on posts that you’ve never even seen. At the end of the day, the process works, and paying an algorithm to comment and like on 500 posts a day will most likely increase the amount of attention your Instagram gets. But in the end, it’s not an organic growth and the increased attention is just a result from the money being put into it, instead of the content that’s being put out, therefore turning Instagram into a place where you can just put money in and receive more attention.
For us, we feel that this situation is just beginning to get out of hand, in a way that it has a negative effect on anyone who is a part of these communities. Obviously, just like everyone else, we enjoy receiving likes and comments on our posts because of that feeling of gratification that someone is interested and paying attention to what we have created. But the most important thing is knowing that the increased attention is a result of us spending more time creating better content, instead of us spending more money to receive attention immediately. The difference being, that one is the delayed gratification created organically by spending time on something and understanding that building a following takes time, versus the instant gratification, which is dependent on how much money a person is willing to spend on bots that go and generate fake gratification for another person who only sees the first person’s work because of that reason. This might be super wordy but this is how we see it, and we feel like there are better ways to go about building a following in this environment.
In our eyes, what’s most important is creating good content and then building a following around that, not the other way around. One of the methods that we have explored for getting our content out there is through Facebook’s ads and promotions. Just like paying bots on Instagram, this obviously costs money, but goes towards advertising in a much more positive and organic way. What we mean is that through FB, our money goes towards presenting our content itself to more people allowing them to make the decision if they want to learn more about us and see more of our work. If our money doesn’t result in more views or people interested in seeing more, it’s a direct result that our content did not resonate with our audience. And the most important part is not that Facebook is better than Instagram, but that paying for people to see your content and gaining more followers BECAUSE of your content is more organic than paying for robots that bring people to you because “you” commented on their picture.
Ultimately, we want people to admire and support each other, especially our generation and the younger generations who spend so much time connected to social media. Lately, it seems to be doing more harm and creating narcissistic tendencies amongst it’s users, instead of helping people communicate with each other. In the end, this isn’t suppose to be a sob story on how we get frustrated with our popularity online, but more of an awareness that the social media world is kind of a joke if you use it for a need to fulfill something that should take a lot of time and effort to achieve. We just want to be real with our audience, because we know that social media plays a big part when starting a blog and it is something that we are constantly trying to get the most out of while also doing so responsibly. We believe that audience engagement is a crucial part of having a successful blog, and that everything we do when it comes to building a community around our content has to be authentic and is based around us actually communicating with our audience one human being to another.
We love posting about our travels, sharing our unique videos and photos with all of you and we plan on continuing to do things the way we have and to keep at it, as we feel that our audience will grow as we do. Thanks for checking out our post today and we hope we didn’t bore you too much with all this writing 😉
