I Hate Social Media

Boy, do I hate social media. Okay, I shouldn't say that exactly because I also love social media. Social media is the reason why I'm at all successful. When I wanted to become an entertainer, I put stuff onto YouTube, I shared it to Facebook, I made a Twitter account and Instagram or whatever. Social media has shifted. It's shifted from people wanting to share their stuff to now obviously a huge branding and marketing tool for companies and personal brands. My personal brand is entertainer. One of the ways in which I'm entertaining people is by creating videos, and I have my long-distance goal of making a feature-length movie. I want to make a movie. But in the meantime, I want to create little videos like these. Now, The reason why I hate social media. I believe there is this fundamental disconnect between content and consumption. We create a piece of content and then we put it out into the world. The problem with that, this piece of content can't just live in one area for you to go and see it. For example, I don't have a huge YouTube following. I think I have under 1,000 followers on one page, I think 3,500 on another page, but who's counting? I want this content, because it's video-based, to live on YouTube. So it's got to look like this, right? It's got to look 1920 by 1080. These are the dimensions for a YouTube video. Now I want to share this same exact video on Facebook. What do I need to do? Facebook is optimizing for vertical content, so my content should look like this. Because while we're watching on our phones, we're scrolling through Facebook just like this, vertically. To have to switch it to horizontal. Of course, it's very tough to do this, but Facebook also loves captions because chances are while you're scrolling through things, you're not hearing what I'm saying, but you're reading it at the bottom of the screen. Now, another way you could put it on Facebook is you could create a square, and you could create that square and add little black bars at the top and the bottom and add a funny caption, you know, maybe like, uh, I hate social media, with like cry faces or like a poison emoji. I don't know. Now Instagram has two ways of doing things also. You could create a post that people will see in your timeline, which is generally best as a square on Instagram. I guess you could do a horizontal video for the timeline, but a square is still best for Instagram. You also want the COVID photo on Instagram to look like a picture. So I may want to do this to create a screenshot for the thumbnail. And now there's another way to consume on Instagram. It's Instagram Stories. At the little top, you'll see my story and you'll click it, obviously, because you wanna consume everything that I put out. But Instagram Stories are just vertical content. You can't put it as horizontal. You can't put it as a square. It needs to be vertical. So for this video, for example, I'd have to throw it into a whole other timeline, edit the dimensions, and since I'm off-centered a little bit, if I put it into that vertical frame, I'm gonna be like cut off, so I'd have to move myself into the middle. Now, while we're talking about vertical content, don't forget Snapchat. Snapchat could only happen if you're doing things live, or of course you could upload videos. But so basically, I should take my phone right now and I should Snapchat this exact moment right now. I am on live videoing myself doing this. I'm posting this to Snapchat. This is my video camera, and you won't understand until I post this video. I am on live videoing myself. And now as this audio is just repeating and repeating and repeating, I'm posting this to Snapchat. I'm making a funny caption, hoping that people will see it, and they'll watch this, and then hopefully somewhere down the line when I put out this video, they'll understand like, oh, that was what he was doing on Snapchat that day. And then I've been fortunate enough to build a following on SoundCloud with a ton of music, so Now that I'm making videos, what am I supposed to do? Am I supposed to pull this audio and put it onto SoundCloud like some sort of podcast or something? What I'm saying is it's just too much. I believe that there needs to be some form of regression. The content creators are definitely out there looking to entertain, hoping that you consume all this stuff and you smile from it, you laugh from it, you learn something, who knows. But at the end of the day, it's really all about the daily reminders. That's all social media is. It's exponential word of mouth. So if you're able to remind somebody on a daily basis, hey, look at me, I exist, this is what I'm good at, if you need someone to do it, hire me. That's all it is. So if you need somebody to emcee a party, make a video, host an event, whatever, here I am. It's Adam, it's TB1, and I'm taking things one day at a time. Now of course, like, share, subscribe, you know, message me, I don't know, all those social media things that you're doing. I don't know where you're watching this, whether it's on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, SoundCloud, you never know. Wherever you're listening to it, I appreciate it. Thank you so much and have a great day.