the Monday Musings column from that consultant bloke

I have been active within various social media platforms for a long time and, at times, have been an enthusiastic user of them for both business and personal purposes, but times are changing.

Perhaps it is the steady progress towards death: This year I will be 70 and the end is getting closer. I have no idea how long I have, but there is a growing desire to enjoy every minute as best as I can, so do I need all the clutter of other people’s lives intruding on what is left of mine? Yesterday I had a look at Twitter for the first time this year and quite frankly I don’t.

Twitter seems, to me, to have gone downhill fast. I used to enjoy scrolling through posts from those that I follow, but now my feed seems cluttered with all sorts of crap that they think I might like and it is hard for me to see the stuff that I want to look at. I have been fiddling with the settings and have got nowhere and so I have just deleted the app off my ‘phone and tablet. There is just so much nonsense on there that I can’t be bothered to wade through it anymore. Whether I retain the accounts or not (Have about four) remains to be seen but, for now, I am down and gone.

That was what started me off and within the hour I have also deleted the LinkedIn apps as well. Within all of the algorithms that they use surely they have one that detects your date of birth, so why do the keep bombarding a sixty-nine year old with job offers? Or offering someone with my CV jobs best suited to someone in their early twenties just starting out on a career? And then there all of the other members offering me services where none of them have really done any research on me or what I do. As with Twitter I will keep the account open for now, but my days of being active are over and I will probably shut the account down very soon.

Facebook still has some merits for me, albeit at one time I thought that it was pretty dreadful. At the moment I can live with it, but why does it keep bothering me with demands to add things? I don’t want to link things to Instagram or WhatsApp. Whilst I have both I have not come to grips with the former and only have the latter because my little sister and another relative use it. As far as I can see I have no need for either platform beyond that.

There was a time when I was trying to use social media for business purposes, but these days I am at a point where I don’t need to anymore. It is like advertising; I don’t. I get a couple of calls a week for people on behalf of 118 and other advertising media and, if I am bored, I might take the conversation past the point where they say who they are and I say goodbye, but I do understand that the caller is some poor sod trying to earn a crust and is being fed from a mailing list. I try to let them down politely so that they can move on to their next potential customer.

The bottom line is that I don’t need social media for business anymore, so why waste any time on it? I have answered that question by the way, so please don’t feel that you need to answer it.

Last year I rationalised my web site portfolio and the cull of Twitter and linkedIn is just and extension of that process. Next up will be my blogging because I have too many of those as well. There was a time when I wanted to keep personal and business issues separate, but even that dividing line is beginning to blur and so I want to look at how I use blogs and see if a better focus is possible.

So if you follow any of my other platforms you might find that I have gone AWOL. It is nothing personal if I disappear off your list of followers, it will just be because I am no longer there. One day I will no longer be here either, which is, more or less, where I came in.