Social media is not real life

I overheard a conversation yesterday…

It went a little like this:

Girl: I’m agitated because I sent you a friend request on social media and you didn’t accept it.

Guy: Right.

Girl: And you didn’t have to accept it, but you didn’t decline either and just left me hanging. And that says a lot about you.

Guy: How so?

Girl: How you act on social media is how you are in real life. You have poor communication.

Guy: That account on social media, it’s my space, and I have every right to accept people or not as I’m comfortable with.

Girl: Well, if you didn’t want to accept me you should have sent me a text message saying so.

Guy: *dumbfounded look*

Is social media truly representative of real life?

In my view? No. It isn’t.

Social media is not real life. It’s one-dimensional. There’s no depth to it.

Social media is a click, a like or an image of avocado on toast with a filter and people seem to hang themselves on receiving hearts or accepting friend requests.

Social media is meticulously curated.

In real life, you have tone, light, and shade.

Real life is raw and imperfect.

I’ve met influencers in real life who were completely different to how they came across on social media.

Some of them were very “out there” and in person were wayyyy reserved.

Some of them seemed sweet and in person were vain and obnoxious.

Heck, if you met me in person you’d probably think I was an utter weirdo compared to how I appear in my videos.

And I don’t apologise for that.

Social media is not all-encompassing, and if you put all of your self-worth and validation in social media, you’ll be miserable.

Guaranteed.

Social media is a tool, yes. And that’s where we need to draw a line in the sand and realise that we can use social media to share and connect and grow our businesses.

But at the end of the day, social media isn’t who we are.

You are not your likes, tweets, views or reshares.

This week I’ve started releasing a series of Pinterest business tutorials.

Because Pinterest is a cool tool (hey…that rhymes!)…

You can use Pinterest to share your content and leverage its incredible reach and discover fantastic resources.

Check out the Pinterest Tutorial Playlist below. I’ll be dropping more Pinterest videos over the next week.

Sara