Social media is remarkable.
Global connectivity is just a click away. You can stay up to date on your friends’ lives, connect with business professionals, search restaurant reviews, and find new romance all conveniently at your fingertips. From a marketing standpoint, there is unlimited opportunity. Social media offers a way to share information to a targeted consumer base. Plus, it provides real-time information sharing, a quality that is unmatched by other marketing mediums. This makes it a wonderful tool to promote both personal and business brands.
Take #BellLetsTalk Day, for example. Anyone who scrolled though their social media feeds last Wednesday knows that their channels were brimming with positive, empowering, inspirational posts about ending the stigma surrounding mental illness. That is astounding. Kudos to Bell for creating a cause-related marketing initiative that manages to bring an entire country together and join a mutual conversation about mental health.
There is no doubt that social media has its advantages, but with benefits come drawbacks. So, while we are on the topic of mental illness, let’s talk about how social media may actually be contributing to the problem.
Social media is unnerving.
As you may have seen in the #BellLetsTalk advertisements, 1 in 5 Canadians suffer from mental illness. It is an epidemic that is particularly prevalent among millenials, and I think social media is partially to blame. Unlike older generations, accessibility is all we have ever known. We are constantly glued to our phones, obsessed with refreshing our newsfeeds and sharing daily life updates with our followers.
The first problem is misconception. People only post things that are exciting. Your feeds are full of photos and posts of people travelling the world, or hanging out with friends, or kissing their significant others under the heart sculpture at the Toronto Christmas Market. This creates the illusion that everyone is living these exciting lives except for you. That’s a sad thought.
The second problem is popularity. People are obsessed with getting “likes.” How can you blame them? It’s a good feeling. But, just because you only received twelve likes on your photo, does not mean that only twelve people like you. The number of views that you receive on a video does not reflect your self-worth. Your follower ratio does not shape your character. Remember that.
The third problem is loneliness. Social media can misleadingly make you think that you are surrounded by cyber friends. Yet, there is nothing lonelier than sitting by yourself, refreshing your newsfeed, waiting for the next post to arrive. We need to remember to put our phones down, and talk with people face-to-face. No, I don’t mean hanging out with your friends while you all stare at your phones. I mean finding hobbies, and interacting with people in real life. Let’s use social media for what it was meant to be used for: being social.
Sami
