too many words by laura lemay

Spread Too Thin Over Social Media

If you’re one of the very small handful of people who read this blog (Hi small handful!), you may have noticed that I published a link over the weekend, and then unpublished it again. You may also note I’ve started cross-posting the pictures I post on Instagram.

I have active social media accounts on Twitter and Facebook, and to a lesser extent Instagram and Pinterest. I have a moribund flickr account. I keep my LinkedIn account updated for work and occasionally read LinkedIn groups. I deleted my google+ account. I do nothing with medium, Tumblr, reddit, vine, and possibly a zillion other sites I’ve forgotten I actually signed up for.

Of all the social media accounts, Twitter is the one where I “live” most of the time. On Twitter I keep up with my feed, I tweet my own tweets as well as links and photos, and I retweet lots of stuff. I read Facebook, but I don’t feel at home there the way I do on Twitter. I don’t really do more than occasionally check other social media sites once or twice a week.

When I restarted this blog I figured I’d put stuff on here that was longer-form than Twitter, but more public than Facebook, and go into more detail about my obsessive gardening hobby. Which is fine, and that’s still the plan, but there are things that feel weird to post here — links are the big one, but there’s also some writing I want to do about work that feels weird intermixed with garden posts and photos. The whole thing is making me feel stretched thin and kind of puzzled about where my “home” is now. If every social media site is a garden that needs regular weeding and planting and upkeep, I’m having trouble maintaining all the gardens.

Initially I thought I would just cross-post stuff from one site to another, maybe set up some automatic cross-posting via IFTTT, and cut down on the maintenance. I used to automatically cross-post from Twitter to Facebook, but I stopped doing that because it’s annoying to people who follow you on multiple sites, and also because on Facebook the audience and the tone is slightly different.

Cross-posting also has issues where the actual thing you’re linking to can get buried behind a bunch of other links from site to site to site and you lose the context of the actual thing. I have a friend who has recently been posting Twitter links on Facebook and then cross-posting them back to Twitter. And I’ve often seen posts that are screenshots of Twitter, posted to Instagram and then cross-posted to Facebook and back to Twitter. Yeesh.

At any rate I am experimenting more with this blog, I am trying to figure out the right places to put things, and how to maintain multiple social media presences without ending up spending my entire day on the internet posting and cross-posting and cross-cross-posting. I don’t have a plan yet, so if you see things get posted and unposted and reposted please bear with me.