The Swings and Roundabouts of Social Media

Over the last two weeks or so, I have been rediscovering my love of Facebook. Not the games, or the other glittery crap that they put out there to distract you, but the very core of what it is. How it works.

Before I had published my first book, before I had even written it in fact, I was always on Facebook. Then along came Twitter, and it became my new darling. This was back in the time before I knew the term social media, and before I even had to begin considering an author platform and a strategy for myself and my profiles.

Jump forward a year or more and I was using both platforms to promote myself and my writing. Yet, there was always, as is only natural, one that seemed to be the favorite. For a long time it was Twitter. It was new, it was different and something about it screamed simplicity in a way that Facebook didn’t. I know they are both dynamic and people post and update their lives as they go, but Twitter still seems more personal to me than Facebook. Maybe it is the short sharp nature of the updates.

Then as I mention at the start, my attention has recently drifted back to Facebook, and I have all but forgotten about Twitter. I know, I know, it is almost a sin, especially as the majority of my marketing is done through Twitter, but that is something for another day.

But it occurred to me, that there is always a hot topic, some flavor of the month that everybody seems to invest more time in than others. It says nothing about the media platform itself, but rather everything about trends set by… us.

It is us who ultimately determine the success of a site, whether it is in terms of crash and burn, or rocket to the moon, the users hold the fate of any such site / platform in the palm of their hands.

So why is there this ebb and flow to social media, what is it about Facebook that keeps pulling you back, only to have Twitter lure you away again? I mean, looking back at the time I have been using both sites, nothing has really changed. Ok, the layouts have been fiddled with.. wait, that sounds wrong. How about adjusted… much better. The layouts have been adjusted, but strip away the paint and the body underneath is relatively untouched.

What is your current darling site, and why did you make the switch back to it?