Wait!

I think someone told you that social media is harming your mental health and it is wasting your precious time and you are going off Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat and other platforms?

If that is the case, please read this article before you go.

We, humans, love romanticizing with something which is always against the ‘sheep’ crowd. When everyone was following a carb-rich diet, we human fall in love with keto because it was against everything we have been following. When everyone was watching television in the 90s, few parents decided to cut the cable off because they considered others idiots. For the same reason, we love revolutions because we see large and large people joining and going against the establishment.

The latest fad, I am seeing is everyone on a roll to quit social media, completely. I see so many ‘Deleted’ accounts whenever I track my Instagram and Twitter unfollowers, I am hearing so much negativity about facebook on every other podcast recorded by self-help gurus and similar kind of people. And people are doing this in indirect peer pressure and just to be in that ‘elitism’ of ‘Ex-Socia-Media Addict’.

Why this is not the right approach?

Social media is a tool. I know, it is an entertainment platform too, but first, it is a tool. A tool to grow your business, a tool to grow your personal brand and a tool to network, communicate and exchange ideas with the entire world. You are right now reading this article means I might gain one more trust point in your brain (read = authenticity), If I run an ad for this article, I will gain a few more followers who might exchange some value with me in form of their talent or service. On a scale of 1 to 100000000, because of this article, I might jump from 1 to 2. I never know if tomorrow some newspaper editor reads this article and asks me to fix and polish grammar so that he can publish this in his newspaper. There are tons of possibility for me just because of this one piece of content.

Now imagine, just like others, I decided to go off social media for the next six months, like a complete break because someone wrote on facebook that quitting social media might improve your mental health, I won’t be publishing this article, I won’t be running ad, I won’t be reaching new people or new dedicated audience and there are hundred per cent chances that no one will be asking me to polish this more to publish this in a newspaper. Here are I lost thousands of opportunities just because someone told me not to use social media.

Our mobiles phones are now the most integral part of our daily life. Please accept this, acknowledge this, write this on a piece of paper and eat it if you still in a denial mode. However woke you are, however successful you are, you cannot and won’t be able to deny that fact that without using mobile phones and social media one can lead a ‘normal’ life. Why? Because every business, your every friend, your parents, your siblings, your better half, all are interconnected to each other because of this piece of device. If someone is telling you that ‘Hey man! you know you can be a successful businessman without using social media or mobile phone” he or she is fooling you!

Tell me, which business in today’s date is possible to run successfully without social media promotions? You want to become the next great content creator? You need social media. You want to become the next great writer? You need social media so that people can read your content. You want to become the next great musician? You will have to upload your content on 12 different places, you will have to managed audiences of those 12 different places by replying each one of the comments, DMs. You will get abuses on those all 12 different platforms, you will have to learn how to cope up with all the negativity because there is no other option. Is it possible for you to record CDs and sell them at the railway station so that people can listen to your music? No.

“No man, I just want to do my daily regular job and be happy with it”

Well, let’s face it. Recession is coming. Jobs are vanishing from the market. More and more people are migrating back to their hometowns. Pick up any newspaper today and you will understand what I am talking about. You love your present job, I understand, but the company doesn’t love you back that much that they will sustain or protect you at the time of recession. But, if simultaneously, you are focusing on the growth of your own brand (sometimes, your own name becomes a brand) on social media, at least you have some back up to fall on. In my honest opinion, in present time, 100k plus followers on Instagram/Twitter is better security compared to your present job. But that’s my opinion.

Giants like Facebook, Google, Twitter will remain giants. Even during the recession, they will remain the same. They have become so big. The best choice in today’s time is to use social media as a tool so that you can become a part of such giants because after all they earn from us and if we use it properly, we can earn from them.

Social Media might be harming your mental health because you are consuming the content more rather than producing, even a tweet is content, one picture upload on Instagram is content, your one positive comment on someone’s post is a content.  Focus on that. Stop consuming media 24/7 like an idiot.