Don’t Let Social Media Anxiety Hold You Back with Jennifer van Alstyne

Photo by Prateek Katyal on Unsplash

Are you a social media lurker? Most people on social media are lurkers, though it doesn’t always feel like that because the people we see in our home feeds aren’t. The people we see most often tend to be sharing not just once in a while, but often.

There are many reasons people, especially professors, stay more private on social media.

Here are some I’ve come across:

• I don’t think people care about what I have to say.

• What will my students think if they follow me?

• If I say the wrong thing, will I get reported?

• I just like to scroll, but I don’t really engage.

• I don’t know what to say.

• I’m nervous about my supervisor seeing what I post.

• Will my post go viral and get me in trouble?

• What if I don’t want to post about my work?

• I have a general anxiety/fear over social media.

Whether you’re a social media lurker or anxious about putting yourself out there, I hope my story helps you. I’m Jennifer van Alstyne, a communications strategist for academics, researchers, and organizations. I help people share their work in online spaces, like social media.

Fear kept me away from social media

While I’m active on social media now, it might surprise you to learn I was so scared of social media, I deleted all my accounts. When I returned, years later, I kept my accounts very private: just for family and personal friends.

There are a few ways people use to control their privacy

• Staying off social media altogether

• Keeping your accounts private

• Using an anonymous account

• Having a traditional account, but not posting yourself except for the occasional share/retweet

• Use customized Privacy Settings in each social media platform

I’ve used all of these at one point or another.

While I did have a fear of being judged on social media, and kind of general anxiety about friends who had huge followings and tons of likes, that isn’t why I left social media.

I deleted my social media accounts after leaving a physically abusive relationship when I was 18. The idea of being seen by the person I feared most felt paralyzing. At the time, I was scared to sleep. I jumped every time the phone rang. Eventually, I moved on campus where I felt safer.

As I began to heal, I started to recognize how small I’d let my world get. I missed the friendships and larger network I’d stopped communicating with. Staying off social media altogether was no longer right for me. So I started a new Facebook account and sent out friend requests one at a time. Baby steps.

I kept being surprised when people connected. I looked deeper into my past, reaching out to childhood friends. Having so many people connect in a short timeframe made me feel good about myself because they were real people I knew. I started connecting with my professors, visiting writers, or people I met at events. When I presented at my 1st conference in undergrad, I connected with my fellow panelists.

Photo by Georgia de Lotz on Unsplash

Social media networking

Later I would learn what that was called: I was networking on social media, one person at a time. Do you groan when you hear the word networking?

As Malisa Kurtz, PhD says on the Beyond the Professoriate blog, “I didn’t realize at the time that networking is just relationship-building—getting to know people I liked, following up with them, and also supporting them when I could.” Dr. Kurtz said networking is about

• Relationship-building

• Getting to know people

• Following-up with them

• Supporting them when possible

And while she wasn’t talking about using social media for networking specifically, these things are all possible there.

Social media is great for relationship-building because it allows you and another person to connect. You can get in touch with that person, and engage with what they share. It’s a great way to get to know them in a more passive way than sometimes ‘networking’ feels.

Following-up may look like a comment or reply. Maybe, it’s a direct message. Social media allows us to support people when it’s possible because we’re more likely to see when we can help. That might look like a Like, or “Congratulations!” It can also be

• Asking for advice

• Help to connect them with someone you know

• Sharing a resource

• Friendship

Networking on social media is really about finding an audience who cares. That’s why moving past your social media anxiety is so important.

Maybe your social media anxiety is more about work. Don’t let fear of your university or students hold you back from being present. Be aware of what you’re saying and that it can be shared. But don’t let that keep you from speaking at all.

I’ve come up with these tips to help you move forward.

• Think about how you spend your time on social media and why

• Take it one step at a time while checking your comfort level

• Join conversations

• Practice bragging the right way

1. Think about how you spend your time on social media and why

Why do you lurk on social media? Maybe it’s one of the reasons I listed at the top of this article. Maybe you have a story like mine, and there’s a specific reason you’ve wanted to stay private on social media.

Before you jump in, consider how and why you use social media the way you do now.

2. Take it one step at a time while checking your comfort level

Don’t try to do it all at once and become super active on social media right away. Take things one step at a time, and check-in with yourself to gauge your comfort level.

I went from being off social media to taking my current accounts out of Private mode. I posted some original content there (mostly personal photos or news). Then, I ventured out onto other social media platforms like Twitter. Now, I’m doing live video on YouTube, like my upcoming chat with Dr. Caitlin Faas about Social Media and Procrastination.

I’ve definitely broken out of my comfort zone on social media. It’s okay to try something new, even if you’re a bit uncertain.

3. Join conversations

The best way to start engaging on social media is to join conversations. It’s another effective way to stop scrolling on social media.

By replying to posts that you like or are interested in, you’re practicing meaningful engagement. Leave a comment on a post you like. It might spark a larger conversation. It’s up to you how much you want to engage, or not.

4. Practice bragging the right way

Practice writing a good news social media post, and sharing it with a personal audience like your family and friends. I know it seems easy, but imposter syndrome tends to strike academics hard when sharing good news no matter how accomplished you are.

When you brag, don’t apologize. And, be specific. Help people understand what your good news is, and why it’s important to you. While social comparison can leave us anxious about sharing good news, practicing it just once tends to make people feel good from the response.

Academic vs. Public Writing on Social Media

“I should be writing” is a common sentiment of academics on the #AcWri hashtag on Twitter. And that sentiment, the idea of academic vs. public writing, holds many professors back from social media. They’re not sure if it’s supposed to be academic or personal. How public does public writing have to be?

Social media is like having a microphone. You can turn it on when you want to reach people. You also have a lot of control over the settings. Some social media platforms help you reach a lot of people at once, like Twitter. Whereas others help you reach the people you’ve already connected with like Facebook and LinkedIn.

Being present on social media allows you to share your academic work and life when you want to. It allows you to connect with a larger audience to share your academic writing with all your audiences

• Academic

• Personal

• Public

Good luck on your social media journey, and remember it’s okay if things change over time.

To take the first steps to manage your online presence as an academic, join my free course The Internet for Academics.

Bio

Jennifer van Alstyne is a communications strategist for faculty and researchers. At The Academic Designer LLC, Jennifer helps people and organizations share their work with the world in online spaces. Her blog/podcast, The Social Academic shares advice articles and interviews twice a month. She is a Peruvian-American poet and independent scholar with a focus on representations of nature in poetry. Connect with Jennifer on Twitter @HigherEdPR.

Psychological Super Powers: How to Make the Most of Networking

Do you groan when you hear the word networking?

You're not alone in that. A lot of my colleagues, when we're at conferences together, kind of do the duck and, "Don't look. Don't look at me. Don't talk to me. I don't want anything to do with this corporate networking world. Avoid." But today, in our Psychological Super Powers series, we're going to talk about networking, and how you can make the most of it.

Caitlin Faas, Psychology Professor and Coach, talking about networking with you today. So let's talk, first, about what happens when you walk into a room to network. First, we walk in and we immediately start scanning and judging the room. We start looking at people, noticing things about them. Often, I'll look at outfits, or think about what people are wearing, who might look friendly, and we start to make all these snap judgments, because our brain is actually trained to do that.

1. Overcome first impressions

We are trained to make first impressions. It's automatic for us. We are trying to jump to conclusions and not really think about it systematically. So, you'd think that we'd systematically go through an algorithm, and kind of add things up, make judgments based on reasonable conclusions, but we're not. That's not what we're doing in this situation.

So, cognitively, we jump to conclusions about the people that we see, and often, it's not positive for us. We notice somebody's outfit and say like, "They're better dressed than I am." We start to say thing about, "They're probably not going to talk to me." It happens back-to-back-to-back in our head. So, thinking about how can we walk into the room and kind of have that inner voice paused and say, "Okay, wait a minute. Stop. What's going on here?"

We talk about this more in the worksheet, so that's the first point, thinking about the room and what's happening when we walk into a room, and how we're automatically going to make judgments.

2. Know that you can succeed

The second thing that happens at networking events is that our brain tells us, "This is a risk. Exit. Get out of here. You're out of your comfort zone," and we immediately start to kind of shut down and not know what to do, but it's also starting to think about, "What's the worst that could happen in here?"

I can start to say things to myself like, "I'm not good enough," or, "These people are better than me," but stopping that internal dialogue, again, to say, "This is not a risky situation. I can succeed in this situation. I can make the most of this," and it keeps us from starting to swim in the land of the middle school lunch table scene, right? It's very similar to what happened in middle school. So kind of reminding ourselves, we conquered the middle school lunch table scene. We also will conquer this networking event.

3. Generate creativity

The third reason we want you to think about networking today, and how to make the most of it, is that networking is actually what leads to innovation and creativity.

We know that from research, it's our weak ties that are going to bind us together. There's a lot of great work about this. If you've ready Sandy Pentland's Social Physics, or Adam Grant's Give and Take, a lot of innovative ideas and a lot of connections happen through networking, so reminding yourself of that can be important.

So, the person I'm doing this series with, Amanda Crowell, the cognitive psychologist, this is our joint series, we actually met at a conference in 2012, and it was one of those situations where we were at each other's posters, and we could have diverted and said, "No, I'm not going to engage. No, I'm going to go back to my room and not talk to people," but it turned into something where we were at each other's posters. We decided to go to lunch together that day. We became friends on Facebook.

Years went by. We didn't necessarily engage with each other that whole time, but now, we've evolved into a partnership where we're making a series like this together, and it was all through just that one instance, making sure we went to lunch together that day. So, inspiration for your networking event.

In conclusion, we want you to remember that networking is really important. We are social beings who are wired to connect with each other and to learn from each other, so use that as inspiration.

We have a three-part guide for you about how you can make the most out of your next networking event. It gives a lot of tips, and is something you can print out to remind yourself.

So, download that worksheet, and let's talk about it.