How to Make My Social Media My Own?
I am sure every day we come across articles and posts that tell us how to make our accounts likeable, how to make sure that people are attracted to it. How to write a perfect bio, how to be seen as ‘aesthetic’, how to appear mysterious, etc, etc, etc… But, I am here to tell you that you don’t owe it to anybody to appear anyway on your social media. You don’t owe it your audience to post smiling pictures, you don’t owe it to the brands to endorse something that you don’t believe in. Your social media is yours, and decorate it however you want to.
I am not telling you how to be an influencer, I am telling you that your social media is your space. And although often we are told how to make sure that more people are attracted to it, to increase followers and likes, and while I am not against any of that… I want to make sure that we understand our social media platforms are ours to create and define. I want to make sure that we don’t get lost in the need to be a certain way on our very own social media despite not wanting to be, despite not believing in those ideas.
A while ago, this influencer who I know put up a story on her account very boldly telling people that they aren’t allowed to tell her what to post or not, and that it is her space. I was really proud to know her that day, I realized that often we get so tied up in the race of being loved by people we start posting what they want and forget that our social media platforms are supposed to show who we are, what we believe in and it is supposed to make us feel safe. At times our place makes us feel judged, uncomfortable and unsafe and that isn’t supposed to happen. It is the same thing as — your home isn’t supposed to make you feel pressured and judged, then why should your online community make you feel this way? Why is it allowed to define terms of your online presence?
Somedays, we tend to forget that it is their space and we don’t need to put up a mask for other people. Posting what you truly believe in, being seen as shamelessly yourself and showing what you believe in, is a statement to make that says that you own your platform. The audience sitting on our social media isn’t there for entertainment and it isn’t our job to please them… because when we create our accounts, we initiate it with the aim to share our lives, and it is the responsibility of the viewers to not judge and let us be who we are. It is our right to not be judged, and even if just out of moral righteousness, it is the duty of the audience to make sure that we have this right intact.
I can understand that some people want to keep their lives and thoughts to themselves, and that is okay… what I am saying is the person who wants to share should also feel free to do the same, because again that is okay as well. Essentially, whatever you do on your social media is okay as long as it is your choice and no other person has the freedom to judge you, ask you to change or post content that they would like to see. In the world of today, we fight for the right to choose — choose the one we want to love, choose to be ‘feminine’, choose to define ourself the way we want — then shouldn’t we also have the liberty to choose what we want to be put up and what not?
More often than not, we get lost in the willingness to please people even if it means showing yourself as what the audience wants to see, and not as the person you yourself want to be seen as. It is honestly, not a mistake on the part of the content creator, instead of the consumer, because sometimes as audience (and as society) we pressurize people into being a certain way or being seen a certain way, at least, but it is nobody’s job to live up to those standards and no one should feel pressured to be anybody they don’t want to be.
A social media platform is your space and you get to dictate it on your terms, it is a platform created by you, for you and to serve your needs and goals, and you have every right to decide the terms on which it runs. The good thing about these platforms is that nobody is forced to stay, you don’t have to see the content that you don’t want to — you can just leave. Conclusively, everyone has a choice, and I am against the fact that sometimes we take that choice away from content creators — it is not our right or job to dictate terms of someone else’s space. Each individual is smart and intelligent to decide what they want to do with their social media, and I hope we realize that soon.
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