Who to block on social media... and why

Yo, yo, yo, I can tast. I can taste. Hello and good evening, my friends. I'm Katie McManus, business strategist and money mindset coach for ADHD business owners. Coming to you live on the Facebooks, on LinkedIn, YouTube and Instagram, talking about a subject that is near and dear to my heart. And I hope as I talk through, through this, you see that you can do this, too. So when you start a business and you're getting clients online, you have to be on social media, okay? It's just a necessity in today's market. And one of the things about the Internet is there are a lot of ass hats on here. So those asshats can absolutely show up in your comments, in your DMs. They can just wreak havoc on your sanity, your mental health, your rage department of your brain, depending on what they're talking about. And I always like to share, my policy when it comes to blocking people is that if I think about blocking you more than three, three times, you're blocked, you're gone. That's it. Simple, easy, peasy. I'm not wasting time. If someone is not contributing positively to my life, be it even, even my social media marketing portion of my life, they do not deserve a second of my attention. Now, there are seven sins and I've written them down that I want to go through. And I'll explain why these are blockworthy. And I'm sharing this because I want you to know that, like, being connected to as many people as possible is not actually something that's going to help your business, okay? Having as many people comment on your stuff as possible, even if they violate any of these things I'm going to talk about, does not actually help you at the end of the day, okay? Because these people are never going to become your clients, all right? The people who are you're considering blocking, they're never going to spend a dollar with you. The people in their networks probably are also going to be miserable because, you know, birds of a feather, right? So, you know, it can feel like you're telling the universe, no, I don't want any more people. But guess what? When you say no to the people who do the things on this list, you make so much more space energetically and virtually for new people to come in, all right? And to have better conversations and better connections, all right? So I encourage you, take anything that I say tonight and start making it. Practice for yourself, okay? Use the block button with reckless abandon. I don't know why I just said it that way. Anyway, top one on my list, and this is a new one this past year, is anyone who uses Chat GPT to comment on my posts. I am not here to connect with robots, okay? I don't show up on the Internet. I don't spend hours each week curating content so that robots can have a conversation with me about it. Nah. If you're obviously using a ChatGPT bot or any kind of AI to write your comments, you are immediately blocked and your contents, your comments are deleted. There. You know, it's just one of those things that, like, if you, if you can't be like, fussed to actually write a comment and have a conversation, I'm not interested. I'm absolutely not interested. And you're not going to add anything valuable to my life. Pretty simple. All right, you know, and the people who are using ChatGPT, you know, if you're doing this, I know it feels like you're kind of hacking the system. I know it feels like you're doing this faster. I know it feels like you're, you're gaming the algorithm, but you're not actually connecting with anyone. Okay? Social media, like, I want you to look at that name. The first word is social. When you're social, you're making connections, you're building relationships. You can't do that with an AI. Okay? Even AI working on your behalf just is not going to cut it, all right? So I urge you, even if English is your second language, even if your grammar sucks, even if you feel like you have nothing interesting to add to the conversation, be yourself, okay? People will have a much better chance of connecting with you and, you know, actually having a, like, relationship, friendship with you. And hello to those of you joining me on Instagram and on LinkedIn. I can never really see the full number from Streamyard, but it's great to have you. If you have any questions on this, I love this to be interactive, so just go ahead and throw a comment or a question in the chat. Next on my list is you will get blocked from interacting with me. If you are a bigot, okay? If you are against women's rights, if you are against LGBTQ plus, if, if you're against equality and equity in the world, if you fat shame anyone, if you're generally just really unkind in an extra ugly way, like, and, and I gen. I tend to block people are who are generally unkind as well. I'm just not interested in having that in my world. I'm a big believer that what you tolerate in your space, you invite More of Right. And I'm one of those people who didn't. Didn't understand that for a really, really, really long time in my life. And I always wondered why I had all these jerks around me until I realized that I was tolerating it. I was tolerating people being, like, not great. And it's actually led to me ending a lot of relationships lately. And I can't tell you how good it feels to not have people like that in my life. Not that I was friends with racists or anything, but, you know, people who are generally unkind. But if you're. If you're a bigot, you say something that's, like, really hideous, you. I might. I might actually, like, have some fun and tear down your argument and then connect with people who like my comments and who are also rallying against you. But. But you will be blocked. Okay. Depending on if I have a free hour or so and how feisty I'm feeling that day. Anyway, that is reason number two why I block people. Reason number three is pretty straightforward. If you're annoying, if I find you annoying, and I'm sorry, like, there are some people who maybe your sense of humor works for everyone else, and it just doesn't work for me. If I find someone annoying, and I think, oh, my God, this person's so annoying more than three times, you're gone. You're gone. I just don't have time. I just don't have time. And I like sharing this one because I want people to see that, like, you don't have to have, like, the standard for people having, you know, terrible, terrible actions against you in order to block them. This is your life. Okay? This is your business. You get to choose what comes into your energy field. You get to curate the types of people who interact with you day in and day out. If someone is irking you. That's a good word. I love that word. I don't use that word often enough. If someone is really, like, irritating you, annoying you, then you can choose to let it happen, by all means, but you don't have to, right? And life is short. Life is short. I could die tomorrow. I could die tonight. I could die in, like, five minutes. All right. I do not want to spend any unnecessary time being annoyed if I don't have to. And I don't have any lip balms. I'm gonna put some lipstick on, even though I look really ratchet, because I was cleaning all day, but I had to go live because I'm doing this challenge with Lauren. Lefkowitz. And if I don't go live for one day, then she has to tell me or she gets to tell me a song that I have to sing and record it and share it for everyone. So, anyway, my lipstick and my sweaty house cleaning clothes. Anyway, so, yeah, don't be annoying. And if you're annoying and just, it's just annoying to me, then I'm sorry you got blocked. Anyway, the other, the fourth thing that I will block for is anyone who I see is being a scammer. Early, early on in my LinkedIn life, when we were like in the pandemic, one of my best friends got laid off from work. And so she, I, you know, got her all trained up on LinkedIn. She started posting. She started like, you know, reaching out to recruiters and applying to jobs. And someone reached out to her and told them, told her that they were connected to me, which I didn't know who this person was. And they scammed like 300 from her. And it was gross. And so I'm. Anytime I, like, think there's a. Or see red flags or think something's off, I just block people because I don't want them to ever have the opportunity to be like, oh, I'm connected with Katie. Nope, you're not. No way, Jose. Get out of here. Anyway, so that's number four. Number five is kind of similar. People who belong in pods who are trying to bring like the pod life to my comment section. If you don't know what a pod is, they are against the terms of service for most social media platforms. But people do them anyway because they promise like a lot of engagement, they promise a lot of comments and likes. And typically you do grow your following, you do grow your connections list, but it's typically just with other people in the pod who are also trying to grow their following and their connections list. And usually everyone's trying to do that because they want to get in front of more of their ideal clients. That backfires. You just get in front of a bunch of other people who are desperate for followers. And if that's your ideal client, then great, you've done your job. But most of the time it's not. But I, I don't like it when my content gets like sucked into this vortex of potters because all their comments from Sake or just like, great post. So interesting, thanks for sharing. And how do you respond to that? That's not a conversation. And it's literally like they're just copy and pasting the same comment in like you know 100 people's different posts? No, not interested in that. So I block them. And I urge you to block them, too, if you want to. I don't. So the sixth one on my list, I. I specify relentless cold DM ers, because if I blocked every single person who cold DM'd me, that would be a lot of people. And, you know, I genuinely think a lot of people are just doing their job, but I will disconnect from them. If someone's DMing me and it's cold and I just don't want it, then I will delete the message and I will disconnect. I won't respond. Because the funny thing about this is the more you respond to people who are cold DMing you, the more you show up to people like that. The algorithm is very, very smart. If it sees that you're interacting with someone who's cold DMing, guess what they're gonna think. Oh, she likes this. Let's put her in front of a lot of people who cold dm like, fabulous. No, no, no, I'm good. Not interested. So if you relentlessly do that, I will block you. I will also block cold yammers if they do what I call negging, which is when it's actually a term from the like. Like a pickup artist kind of book. So nagging is where you go up to someone in a bar and you're, like, hitting on them, where you actually say something really mean to them, like. Like, I can't even think of something. But it's like you tear them down so that they want your approval. And so how this might look on LinkedIn is you go up. You go up to someone, you DM someone and you say, hey, you know, I looked at your LinkedIn profile, and it looks like it needs a lot of work, so I would love to help you with that. Like, that's not very. That's not nice. Like, that's not kind. And for some people it might be true. But, like, you obviously don't Understand how a LinkedIn profile works when you're running a business, my friends. So, anyway, yeah, I'm not a big fan of cold DMing. I never train my clients on it. And last but not least, I will block you if you make me feel unsafe. You know, as a woman in the world, I've learned that any. Any sign that someone is not safe should be listened to. And the more people stay connected with you and learn about you, if you get the vibe and it doesn't, you don't have to have anything specific or tangible to point to, to be able to decide this person feels unsafe. To me, you can just say, hey, this feels like an unsafe person. I'm not going to stay connected with them. And then you get to hit the block button, and it's really magical because then you don't have that person in your life anymore. Okay. And, you know, let's be real. There are a lot of people who may not be in their right mind. They might not be particularly healthy, and they may be genuinely not safe. So I find it always better to just not have them in your life. Anyway, this is kind of a light topic for tonight because I was cleaning all day and I didn't want to have to sing. So, Lauren, today was day three. If you're watching, I do not have to sing today. This is a good day. Any day where I do not have to sing and embarrass myself publicly is a massive win. Anyway, everyone, thank you for joining. I'm Katie McManus, business strategist and money mindset coach. I'm gonna actually, like, go and try to make myself fold some laundry and then go to sleep because tomorrow's Monday, and I have so many exciting things happening this week. I can't wait to share it all with you. Anyway, thank you for joining, and I will see you all soon.