Social Media is…Whatever You Follow

Raise your hand if you have never heard the following “complains” from your group of friends/colleagues:

“Man, Facebook stinks. It’s full of cat pictures (d’oh!!) dogs, pets, babies, nonsense and Extras from online magazines. You cannot find anything interesting on Facebook these days. You’ve lost your privacy and you cannot even find your friends. Facebook stinks!”

“Man, twitter sucks. It’s full of links on top of other links. I’m so tired of seeing only promotional articles and bitly links. You cannot have a simple friendly conversation there. One cannot chat and express his opinion anymore. It’s all lost in the million link tweets “

“Man, Instagram is stupid! It’s full of cat pictures, food, sunsets, sunrises and selfies. People can keep saying this app is cool all they want, but I never see anything other than crappy pictures and overused hashtags. If you ask me, Instagram is a waste of time.”

It used to bother me whenever I heard someone say something similar. It seemed somehow stupid for someone to talk like that about a particular social network whereas in my case things were completely different. While I was there, reading interesting articles on Facebook, seeing interesting conversations on Twitter and wonderful pictures on Instagram. But after several contradictory discussions I realized that social media is entirely different for each one of us. What social media means for me will not apply to you. What I follow is not the same as what you follow. We can have the same group of friends, we can like the same pages but your feed will not be 100% my feed.

Before declaring that Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Instagram, etc. suck, take a look at what you’re following. If it sucks for you is because you once had the chance to choose…and you chose bad.