Social Media Hate

When I first started using social media, I was a college student just beginning to develop fairly basic websites while working on a BA in Creative Writing. Back then social media mediums or channels were pretty minimal. If Facebook existed at all, it was pretty basic and nascent.

There were “bulletin boards” (most of which are now gone), but if you wanted to promote a business or chat you could.

Since most businesses back then weren’t online unless they were major global brands, it was relatively quick and uncomplicated to take a business website and rocket it to the top of Yahoo search (hard to believe it was huge back then but it was). If anyone used search back then, Yahoo was the main vine.

I noticed even way back then that most businesses had no idea how to use social media.

There were two primary uses for it back then, and, ironically enough, still today: You either wanted to chat or “lurk” around and check things out, occassionally asking a question or commenting to someone you thought you knew or “might” be a friend in real life. The other opposing use was to promote a business or service andn be found quickly and easily by your ideal customer or client.

Now, decades later, that innocence of conducting straightforward research or openly promoting a business are gone and clouded over by armies of spammers, phishers, creepy nefarious lurkers with evil intent, or just time-wasting superficial nonsense.

If you promote a business today, you may attract spam reviews or irrelevant comments. Many businesses now post phone reviews they pay for. If you aren’t very methodical, conciously and actively vetting every source and speaker, you won’t know if what you’re reading is useful and relevant or mindless overly-reactionary drivel.

Why Is Hate So Prevalent?

I think negativity, spamming, hate, and related content online today is so common for a variety of related reasons.

One main reason is anonymity. Despite what Facebook and other social media platforms may wish for, it’s still very easy to be anonymous online. Your name can be something ridiculous or a code or series of gibberish letters and your “face” can be a cartoon character or silly-looking animal face.

When I went to networking events such as Chamber of Commerce meetings, or gave mentoring sessions, or taught in-person workshops nobody was anonymous. Imagine if someone showed up to an in-person workshop wearing a cartoon character mask and said their name was “Skippymuffychocolate.” I’d show them the exit or call security or both. A mentoring session with a NonProfit Organization founder refusing to provide their name and appear face-to-face during a video conference call? Hard pass. Why? You wouldn’t know who you’re dealing with and you couldn’t take anything out of their mouths seriously.

And so it is with social media 99.9% of the time. The person could say they’re one person and be someone else. An “investor” could be a fourteen year old living in their mother’s basement trying to “build their empire” one victime at a time. It’s happened before and it’ll happen again. And certainly with online dating, we’ve all heard stories of people saying they’re one thing, and appearing “in the flesh” and clearly being completely different or posting outdated photos of themselves they look nothing like currently. The ease of misrepresentation is just too, too easy for many to avoid.

So if anyone can misrepresent themselves, that means they also free to post hateful content or just content that spins you around like a top leaving you more confused than you were before or just waste your time.

Much of the content, therefore, can be like high school discourse. Superficial, shallow, childish, attacking others for any perceived break from the herd.

When you operate at that basic animalist level of feeding off others’ pain and humiliation, you also enjoy the jeers and cheers of the crowd who also enjoy the bullying.

Going Around in Circles, Until You Stop Spinning

Like the old song “Will It Go Round in Circles,” it’s very easy to see how the internet can spin most people around like tops spinning furiously around, purposely, until it loses momentum and falls on its face.

So how can entrepreneurs stop wasting time on social media and use it purposely?

Let’s start by taking a step back and re-examining just what social media was but is now. Social media was originally created for college students to chat casually, collaborate on homework (email and closed “bulletin board” chat) or provide input and get feedback on professional project development without having to wait weeks for physical mail to arrive or if you couldn’t reach someone by phone.

The more people joined in, the more diluted that innocence became. Add anonymity to that and global reach, and you have what can be a seething shapeless bottomless pit. Now add global and local advertisers to that mix. Now add an army of billions of struggling entrepreneurs to that mix, desperately trying to gain followers or promote their offerings by any means they think will work. Then add AI pabulum. Now the bottomless pit widens into a swirling black hole.

It’s incumbent on any serious professional who’s working with limited time, limited resources (including mental and emotional bandwidth), to use time online strategically. Because there is so much information vying for your attention as there is misinformation, along with scavengers and sycophantish time-wasting content, it’s vital to remember that for a business owner social media should be used to distribute and redistribute branded social media-packaged content to your ideal targeted consumers (by using the right terms and subjects needed to promote our piece of content. You also need to use the right hashtags.

Next, on a regularly rotating basis, simply repackage that content into another form of media so that for example a blog post could be an audio podcast episode. It could also be a video clip – or both. And then you’d simply distribute that “new” piece of branded content to appropriate social media platforms every 30 to 90 days, depending on how many pieces of collateral you have.

Content Repurposing Example

I was a guest on someone’s podcast a few years ago who interviewed me at length about my experience, background, and how I’d handle certain situations. So the interview was very broad with all kinds of topics being covered from my political campaign experience, working in agencies, to running my own small digital agency for a few years to starting my own nonprofit.

From that single interview, he created almost twenty short form videos, multiple podcast episodes, and promoted each separate audio podcast episode or video clip every few weeks as something totally new with new hashtags, new SEO search terms, to different social platforms ideal for that medium (for example audio went to Spotify and videos wento YouTube and BitChute or Vimeo or Daily Motion or all of them). This is content repurposing defined and used.

By using social media with a very discening purpose, we get more done in less time. As a business owner, you should be directing a digital marketer or copywriter (ideally) to write SEO-focused, targeted content for your ideal consumer that addresses their most pressing concerns.

Another Content Repurposing Example

An example would be a divorce lawyer creating content that speak to people going through difficult divorces and the steps involved. Imagine how many podcast episodes you could create on the various steps, challenges, variations, contracts, and things to watch out for, in a painful divorce proceeding. Now take each one of those episodes and turn them into blog posts, then turn them into videos and then clip those videos into shorter bite-sized chunks for people who want to watch these videos while at the gym or doing errands. Then make videos humanizing you while you discuss your credentials and practice, and speak to what each staff member specializes in if you have them.

You could follow the same procedure for any type of business if there’s a will to grow online and expand exponentially.

Creating, Not Consuming Is Key

By creating rather than consuming. By using social media as a business owner rather than as an observer, we maximize time and energy and begin utilzing it as a business owner and not as another pack member following others or avoiding drama. Do what larger competitors do and learn by their example if it’s relevant to you and achievable (which it is for anyone who has the time and patience even at a minimal basic introductory level).

Summing Up

And when searching on forums, be discerning, check against legitimate known large newspapers such as “The New York Times,” medical journals that are known and established, and look for multiple confirming sources from reputable sources as well. Play by different rules when posting as an individual and not a business owner or professional and monitor your medium before opening up or believing what unknown anonymous voices opine.