Would it be wrong to say that today our lives are completely and utterly consumed by social media? Certainly not! Given this reality, how do we know how to behave in this virtual-social space? In the real world, we have cultural norms and upbringing to teach us how to differentiate between right and wrong. In a world where nothing is real and everything is virtual, and your every action equates to a ‘post’, ‘like’ or ‘tweet’, how do we know how to act with grace? Social media platforms, especially Facebook and Twitter, are merging our professional, personal, virtual and real lives into one. Thus, making it ever-so-important to approach and use these mediums with caution and forethought.
Below are some tips which may help you navigate your way through social media with grace:
With Facebook always coming up with new privacy settings, you can now create a completely customised privacy plan to suit your needs. If there are constant posts appearing in your newsfeed from a particular friend that you feel are cluttering your wall, you can simply click on the drop down menu in its upper right-hand corner and click on ‘unsubscribe’.
But the first step to acquire and master social grace in the world of social media is to decide: Who should you ‘friend’? Different people have different approaches towards ‘friending’ people on Facebook, some have an "everyone’s-welcome" attitude, while some only extend Facebook friendships to their friends in the real-world. Therefore, one needs to decide on what their expectations are from this medium. If you have a friends’ circle which is too wide, there are more chances of your newsfeed being cluttered by applications, requests, events, chat sessions etcetera.
Sharing statuses on Facebook is at the heart of this social networking site. It is these updates that help us stay clued-in on our friends’ activities, from what they had for lunch to how they feel about certain politicians. The challenge is to exercise caution and not abuse status updates by over-sharing. For instance, the occasional complaint related to your work is a perfectly normal thing to do. However, constantly complaining and bombarding your friends’ newsfeeds with them is not very pleasant or intelligent! Especially when there have been instances of employees being laid-off because of posting inappropriate work-related statuses.
Uploading photos is another commonly used feature of the social networking site. The invasion of digital cameras and smartphones has made it ever-so-easy to upload pictures on to your profile. In fact, using your smartphone, you can upload pictures and tag friends in real-time on to your profile by using applications such as Instagram. Again, while tagging pictures of friends one should be careful to assess whether the pictures being tagged are appropriate enough to appear on your friends’ timelines or not. If you are concerned about pictures you are tagged in, you can simply revisit your privacy settings to ensure that any tagged pictures of yourself are subject to your approval.
Given the openness of this medium, it is quite common to receive friend requests from friends of friends, who you may have only met once socially, or complete strangers. By no means are you under any obligation to accept such requests. Even in the event that you feel compelled to add them, you can always add them to a severe custom privacy list.
Even though Twitter is not as popular as Facebook, it has emerged as a powerful medium for people to share their thoughts with the world. When it comes to Twitter, the more people you follow the better your experience will be. Although, somewhere down the road, for whatever reason, you may no longer wish to follow a particular individual. The solution: you can always unfollow them.
‘Retweeting’ (RT) is a powerful way to build conversations on this medium. Simply tweeting an update means broadcasting it. However, this can be useful only if you are a celebrity with a large number of followers. Otherwise, to have a more meaningful experience on Twitter, it is recommended that you interact with people you are following through retweeting (posting what someone else has shared), replies (answering a question or giving an update) and mentions (tagging Twitter handles of users).
Twitter is a medium more open than Facebook. It may happen sometimes that negative comments appear in response to something you said and you find yourself in a sticky situation. In order to handle such situations the best thing to do is to ignore the comment. Not responding to a post or comment does not make you look bad. If you still feel the need to respond to it, then think it through. Spend a few minutes contemplating whether you should respond or not, and if you should, what your response should be. Lastly of course, double-check for any spelling or grammatical errors. Whatever point you are trying to make will not be taken seriously if your use of language is incorrect.
The bottom line for using any social medium is to keep in mind that these sites are public. Whatever content you choose to publish here has the chance of being viewed by someone on the other side of the world, and chances are you probably don’t know them at all.