Friday, May 22, 2015

Why I Left Facebook, and other social media thoughts

I am not complaining- not one bit.  But life is busy.  Really busy.  The day to day of being a WAHM with an almost 4 year old, and a rapidly growing and thriving business makes time just whiz on by.  The only reason I have a few minutes here is because I am patiently  waiting for my husband to get done his project to come help me unroll and cut fabric.

One thing that I did in the last month was leave Facebook.  My business page is still up, but my personal page has been deleted.  I thought about it for some time before doing it.  I was posting less and less, and the things I was posting was not getting much interaction.  Other's posts were either politically or racially polarizing, and what was the final straw was learning of my cousin's death via Facebook.  I knew she was sick, she had been for years, but the experience was entirely impersonal reading FB updates.  And I realized that had there hadn't been FB, I would never have known.  Perhaps cutting those final ties were for the best.  I decided those that wanted to keep in touch have plenty of other means to do so (for crying out loud, I feel like all my info is all over the internet.  It isn't difficult to hunt me down).

The one thing that was a bit jarring at first was how it changed the relationship with my phone.  Suddenly I had some free time.  I wasn't feeling like I had to check my phone all the time.  Granted, I moved on to Instagram, but IG is so different.  Instagram is fun!  It's like mini blogging with pics.  As far as using it for business- it's like a behind the scenes of what goes on- what the day to day is like for a small handcrafted business owned by a mom.  I've connected to other WAHMs, crafters, lovers of the small business movement, and the ever popular cat accounts.  Because the internet was started for cat videos and pics, after all!

I've been hearing that the golden age of blogs is over.  I think that in many ways this is true.  There are newer platforms for sharing thoughts and ideas.  What do you think?  Are you blogging less?  Using different social media platforms these days?