Social Media Cleanse Week 2: Protect What is Sacred

Featured Artwork: Julie Mehretu Art “Empirical Construction Istanbul” 

Week Two Welcome!

This week your challenge is going to be two sided. The first half of your challenge is to redefine what you are willing to share on social media. The second half of your challenge is to decide who you want to see it. Sounds simple enough right?

Let’s dive in….

Protect what is sacred

This half of the challenge is going to be defined differently for all of us. Decide what you want to share in your life… set a personal rule, and stick to it.

What is the harm in posting everything?

The more you expose, the more vulnerable you are. The more vulnerable you are, the higher the chance social media can have a negative impact in your life.

For Example:

What happens when you post about a life changing moment and you get a minimal response on social media. Does that lessen the experience for you?

What about when you post an opinion piece about a topic you feel strongly about… and you get critical comments in return.

Posting photos of you kids or your partner is also a topic you may want to explore. Young kids don’t have the right to consent to posting a photo, are you posting something they will be embarrassed by in the future? What happens if you post about your new boyfriend and things actually come to an end, do you feel like you have defend yourself to your entire newsfeed?

This leads us to the next set of big decisions…

Define your inner circle.

Once you have decided what you want to share with the world, decide who you want to share it with.

The second half of your challenge is to go through all of your friends lists this week.  Yes, all of them, on all platforms and define who you want in your inner circle.

That’s right. It is a mass “unfriending”. Guilt free. You are taking steps to protect yourself and most importantly taking control of your online footprint.

Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter have celebrated a few birthdays by now… so you may be surprised by who snuck onto your friends list.

Some simple questions to ask when scrolling through may be:

“Do I want this person to have access to my personal life?”

“Would I value this person’s opinion on things I post?”

I’ve also heard some people say.. If you haven’t spoken in three years, give them the boot… Now I don’t really know how I personally feel about setting hard set rules like the three year rule but it may work for you. Especially if you have a hard time making decisions.

But what about my business/ brand?

I totally get that social media can serve as a business or a brand for you. If you are the face of a team, brand, company, then cutting your followers in half may not be in your best interest.

Like, seriously… I just doubled the amount of social media accounts literally one week before I launched a “Social Media Cleanse”. Who does that?

For me, I decided it was necessary to separate the two. They both serve a different purpose. One is to stay connected with family and friends, the other is for work.

Maybe splitting up your accounts is a great solution or  if you decide to keep one account, maybe you start to think about what you share with a different perspective.

If you decide to not control who is following your social media accounts, scroll through them anyways. Taking time to look at all of your followers will give you a nice reminder of who is seeing your posts. It may help you be mindful of what you post in the future.

Do you really want to share that photo with ALL of those people?

Redefine, Move Forward

Figure out what you want to share

Scroll through your accounts

Decide who you want to share it with

This may spark a drastic change in some of your social media behaviors… Don’t get hung up on what you have shared in the past. Just move forward. You don’t have be held captive to what you have done in the past. You have permission to change.

Alright, Week 2. Let’s do this.