When did you last reply to someone on a social network?

Too many of us have forgotten the “social” part of social media.

It's long been a fundamental part of my social media training and lecturing work that journalists use social platforms in three distinct ways:

1. Promotion — “read my stuff”.
2. Story-finding — research, source discovery and UGC sourcing/verification.
3. Networking — working the beat, building a network of readers and contacts.

Not all social networks are equally good for all three. For example, I imagine that the majority of people reading this might use Truth Social for story-finding, if they're reporting on US politics and culture, but would be unlikely to use it for promotion or networking.

A social media imbalance

However, the reality is that the vast majority of publishing businesses spend more time — often many times more — on Promotion than the other two put together. And that's not just a missed opportunity, it also makes their time invested in promotion less effective. However, almost always, they're worst at the last bit: Networking. You might be, too. So, here's a question to ask yourself:

When did you last reply to a post on a social network?

When did you last use it as a place to interact and discuss, rather than as a place to promote and sell? When did you last use it as a place for personal contact and relationship, rather than as a marketing tool? Are you paying lip-service to the idea of community, or are you putting the effort into developing a real relationship with your audience?

This is also the only true antidote to the rise of the dead internet. As algorithmic services reward posts with the most “engagement”, more social networks full up with AI slop, purpose-created to be algorithmically effective. The counter to that is to reject simplistic “engagement” as a metric, and think of value:

• If I get thousands of likes on a low-effort piece of content, how does that help me to build a community around my content? It doesn't.
• Conversely, if I get a small number of people engaging around some more personal posting, isn't that helping develop an actual, emotional bond?

The relationship effect > the network effect

Social platforms are capable of being places where we develop true relationships, with genuine emotional bonds. Yes, this comes with risk. I was surprisingly upset when I realised that an old friend, one of the critical people in my decision to go self-employed 13 years ago, has unfriended me on Facebook at some point over the last year. That was a connection that I valued, and having it cut off hurt. It's probably my own fault: I've been far too lax at maintaining relationships over the past decade, to my own detriment as much as anyone else's. But it still hurt.

But that feeling applies the other way around, too. And that's why it matters to true audience work, not just the stats-and-conversions version. The more we build social (or parasocial) relationships, with our audience, with the community we're writing and reporting for, the more valuable we become to them. The more valuable those relationships are, the more people want to preserve them, because they're emotionally invested in them. And, then, the harder it is for them to unfollow or to unsubscribe from them.

Nowhere is that more evident than in the growth of podcasting. So many shows owe their growth to the emotional impact of hearing the same voices in your ear, every single week. The parasocial relationships that result, our attachment to the hosts of the podcast we love the most, is a valuable part of their audience strategy. But the same applies to many of the best newsletters. The person whose byline (and photo) at the top becomes our trusted curator, or commentator. We enjoy the parasocial impact of hearing a person's voice in our heads as we read their words.

The intellect needs the emotion

Many people in journalism overweight the intellectual need for our work, and undervalue the emotional connection it can build. Journalism is not an abstract art; it is a service performed for people. Our audiences can – and should – value both the information that we deliver, and the people that deliver that reporting. That last link has been too deeply severed in recent decades, and the astounding decline in trust in journalism is the result.

There's no easy solution to the problem. Relationships are hard to form and easy to break. It's going to take a lot of work to rebuild them.

But you can start right now. You can log into your favourite social platform, and interact with somebody, just for the joy of conversation. You could leave a comment here. You could share someone else's work, with a thoughtful comment. Anything that you can do to bring human relationship back into the world of journalism takes us another step in the right direction.

Try it.