How to win at social media

It's clear that we're at a point in our technologically-driven world where we spend a majority of our leisure time (or non-leisure time) staring at a screen, eyes and minds rotting for several hours a day. When so much time is spent swiping left, right, up, down, and in circles, scrolling through facades our peers, a pattern of how we use social media emerges. And when patterns exist, opportunities arise to take advantage of those patterns. Allow me to explain:

Facebook
To me, Facebook is good for three things - storing pictures that I don't already have downloaded to my computer, having group chats that I normally wouldn't have over text (the fantasy baseball and basketball leagues I'm in are good examples), and posting links to this blog for all of you wonderful people. We've taken to Twitter for sporadic updates about our lives, following along with breaking news, and a majority of our photographical escapades take place on Instagram. Facebook in its heyday was a place where people could put literally everything in one place. Now that other platforms are dedicated to individual pieces of that puzzle, Facebook seems to be lost in the storm.

Twitter
I love Twitter. I think that every single one of my tweets are golden. Twitter is an excellent place for me to tell everyone something that I'm not sure who I should tell individually. There is a lot of humor in the Twittersphere, and if you can craft a balance of friends who you're obligated to follow, friends you actually find interesting, well-known accounts (celebrities or sports teams are good examples), and accounts meant for nothing but the sheer joy of humankind, then you're all over the Twitter game.

Instagram
I was steadfastly off the Instagram train for a long time, but then decided that it was worth dipping into. Here's why everyone is on Instagram - it's the easiest thing in the world. You see something that's worth taking a picture of, choose from one of 19 filters, and you're done. When you're scrolling through your Instagram feed, you're doing the same thing you are on Tinder, minus the social implications. Snap judgments of a picture, and an imperative to double-tap and like the picture, or keep scrolling. The lure of Instagram is that everything is right in front of you. There are no links to take you to the picture, nothing extra you have to do to like it. It's a big reason why I aim for all pictures and videos on my blog to be within the post - because you're not really going to sit through a YouTube ad just to see a video I've linked up, but you'll watch if it's right there.

So that's the haps on social media. We're all about the right now in the technological world, so we wants pictures readily available, we want to be able to click one button to serve approval across the social realm, and we want lists because they're chunked into small bits of words we can read instead of a large paragraph. Social media is a social game, but we're the players. Play on.