Lately, I’ve been thinking about which social media is best to be on. With Elon Musk buying Twitter (or trying to) and with Facebook and Instagram plagued by misinformation and ads while turning into Meta whatever that will mean, there are days when I’m disgusted with all the old social media platforms, but I’m also not ready for TikTok, nor do I know if I will ever be.
Looking for an alternative, I turned my attention back to Pinterest. It’s a platform I had tried to get into for awhile, but then didn’t find a great way to participate. Pinning things on boards didn’t necessarily resonnate with me, especially since I use social media primarily to promote our MFA program, our undergraduate writing and literature department (plus languages; philosophy; women’s, gender, and sexuality studies; etc.—what can I say, we’re eclectic), and the Eudora Welty Writers’ Symposium. I’m looking for a place or places to have a presence in case the big three, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, become unbearable.
One thing I noticed about Pinterest that caught my eye is that it is still privately owned. Meta hasn’t gobbled them up. Neither has Google or YouTube. Though they now have some business features that I need to explore, it still operates about the same as it always did: you need an image from a site (or your own), and then you can pin it to a board. This will actually work fairly well for collecting links to the many magazines our MFA students and faculty publish work in. I don’t get to write a post about them, but I also only have to use the Pin It bookmark to create one, so that’s fairly easy. I can have another board with pins for MFA program news, and another one for writing advice, etc. It will take a little rethinking, but it could become a decent place to collect information and links that will be of interest to people who have left Facebook or flown away from Twitter. It probably won’t be enough all on its own, but could certainly be the escape pod I’ve been looking for.
Ages ago, we also started a presence on Tumblr. Who knows, maybe soon I’ll need to explore going back there as well. Or maybe I’ll have to make the leap to TikTok after all or find another social media platform to meet our needs. Yes, we do have something of a presence on LinkedIn, though we’re not terribly active there either. Where do you plan to go if there’s a mass exodus from Facebook and Twitter?
Kendall Dunkelberg 
TBH, WordPress is already almost over my head. But to respond – I donât expect a mass exodus from FB or Twitter any time soon, and have no interest in learning the protocols of a new social media platform (even Pinterest, which Iâve flirted with but donât think I have an account on, or if I do, I donât check it at all).
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That is a great question! I wonder if some of Joe Pulizzi’s work about content creation and content marketing might be helpful for this question. Although his focus is on content marketing , and it may not directly align with your goals, he does have some good ideas about building audiences. https://www.joepulizzi.com/about/ . I’ll be interested in hearing where you land.
Some people are trying out Mastodon or using Discord.
Mastodon is new to me. I may have to check it out. I’ve tried Discord a bit, but haven’t gotten too into it yet. Of course, for writers, there is Paged. I’ve on it, and it seems like a good place to post calls for submission for our magazines. Not a lot of other activity yet that I can see.