Today I saw this tweet by Steph Smith and it got me thinking.
For all of my adult life my friends haven’t really been my social graph.
What I mean by that is that I’m not the person who wants to scroll for hours looking at pictures of what my friends are doing.
Don’t get me wrong. I want to know what they are up to and how things are going, but every single day?
Nope.
So what do I do online?
I follow my interests.
If someone tweets something that I’m interested in I’ll then check out their profile. If what I see interests me then I’ll follow them.
The same goes for every other platform.
My Reddit account has a frontpage that is tailored to my interests.
Everything that I do online, including the things that I create here, are tailored around my interests.
And that’s a beautiful thing.
Social media thrives when you’re able to find interests that help you grow and push you further.
From there, you can find people that share those same interests.
From there, you might even make some new friends.
So Steph is right in that social media is more about the Interest Graph than the Social Graph, but the Interest Graph doesn’t work without the Social.
Interests aren’t that fun when you can’t talk about them with other people.
So in this case, it’s still okay to call it social media.