Social media are just tools

Two months ago I published a strongly opinionated blog post: It's time to get away from social networks. It was so liberating, and I largely keep my positions today. However, I should perhaps qualify my thoughts a little. After a good break where I uninstalled my apps, stopped posting on social media, and sometimes made my profiles private to be less nervous about the public aspect, I decided to try again. But this time differently.

I updated my websites

First of all, writing down my thoughts and making the decision to step away from social media helped me a lot. I can't remember when I started using Twitter, Reddit, YouTube (never really stopped tho 🫠, just reduced). Oh my! It was a long time ago 👴.

Positive impact and awareness

Stopping using them created the urge to update my websites to post more blog posts, create an RSS feed for indiedevcasts.com, and update my designs.

I was fully focused on improving the user experience so people could feel at home there. YouTube was out of scope, as I considered it too important for my gamedev stuff (third-party dependency...). So I kept posting there and tried to focus on my channel with devlogs and knowledge sharing.

Stepping away had a positive effect and led to greater awareness. Now I always post a lot more content on my websites and prioritize them over social media.

Making stats from social media

I've also had better results redirecting to content I own instead of experiencing social lock-in. There are two main reasons for this in my opinion:

• People are curious about your website, your universe,
• and metadata tags improve visibility.

🧨 The last point is crucial! You can tweak your meta tags to make your content more appealing (i.e image, headline). By redirecting to your platorm you break your dependency on proprietary platforms.

Social media are tools

That's all they should be for a business. For individuals the story is different and the problems are more or less complex (addiction, echo chambers, propaganda impact, ...), even if it's important, it's not the main subject here.

As an entrepreneur, you are closely linked to your business

🪞Trust is built through your public image and your actions. Whether you like it or not, you are the image of your company especially as an indie hacker, solo dev. I dediced not to worry too much about it and to be free to experiment and share. If I feel too much pressure, I can take a break, switch my profiles to private, and just breathe.

Use canonical URLs

Did you know that you can use canonical URLs on the indiehackers.com and dev.to platforms? By doing so, the content will be considered a duplicate of the original. This will improve your SEO and help you take ownership of your content better. Here is an example of a canonical link tag:

<link rel="canonical" href="https://theredfi.sh/posts/i-revamped-my-landing-page-here-is-what-i-learned">

Write quality content

You don't have to:

• Write bullshit articles to keep up with trends (e.g AI, chatGPT). Don't get me wrong these topics could be interesting.
• Write empty shells just to keep your account active.
• Forcing you to engage in conversations just to create meaningless connections and push your image by all means.
• Do bad storytelling. Thanks to LinkedIn I have access to a ton of shitty posts every week. Can someone tell them that they don't need to invent a life or numbers to talk about their business/company 😅? Fortunately there is also excellent feedback from entrepreneurs and employees.

Owning your content also means you can set your own rules, without any concessions.

Horror stories with Twitter

People whose business depends on Twitter are pretty stuck. They can't leave because they refer to past threads in many places and they have a large audience. It's the same elsewhere, I'm just used to Twitter so I took it as an example.

• What happened when the algorithms were changed with poorer reachability? And when people decided to move elsewhere? Freya Holmér talks about it in her twitter thread and also sums up the issues on other platforms quite well.

• What happened when Twitter decided to charge $42,000/month with a 24 hours notice to businesses using their Enterprise Tier? Answer by Simon Høiberg in their YouTube video Elon Musk Broke My SaaS Business.

... and so forth.

Own as much as possible

As soon as you can, own your content. It's difficult because we rely on platforms on a daily basis, we place our trust. Sometimes I wonder what would happen if GitHub did the same thing (e.g pricing)? YouTube (e.g banning your channel) or any service you rely on every day?

There is no real answer to this. Own your content as much as possible, especially critical assets that are part of your business. Own as backup. Don't put all your eggs in one basket.

Is it worth the effort?

Distribute your content across multiple platforms, while retaining ownership? It does seem difficult. What trade-offs and risks are you willing to accept?

I will certainly never use social media as I did before; but I decided to use them as tools for my businesses. Writing down my thoughts helped me think twice. Stepping back for a few months was the best decision I made and now I can make informed decisions.

That's all for today, enjoy your week and see you for the next blog post!

Besides, I planned to add an RSS feed to the blog, I just don't have the time now but it should happen!