As a blogger, social media is the most powerful tool we can use. It’s how we share our posts, connect with other bloggers and most importantly, our readers. I am by no means a social media hater. I love it. Instagram gives me new places to go take pictures, Twitter directs me to the latest news, and well Facebook is there if I’m ever bored.
I was also a big supporter of only having one account that was my personal and tied into my blog. It is a million times easier to keep up on social media this way. But somewhere along the way I stopped feeling like this. I made the decision to split my blog life from my personal life online and it has given me a whole new perspective. Here is why I separated my blog and personal social media accounts.
Keep it Classy
I love Twitter. It’s often my comedic relief and a place that is quicker to connect with people. I’m an avid gif and meme user and sometimes I post things that are funny. But I also post things that are personal to me that would only make sense to the friends and family that follow me. As a blogger, I always want to be as professional as I can. Right now I complain a lot about grad school and tweeting about it just releases some stress.
When trying to work with brands I want to make sure they are getting the best out of me. I began to feel bad when posts about them would get buried underneath minor details of my life or retweets of random things. So I got to the point where I stopped tweeting because I wanted to make sure my feed felt professional. But that also made me not want to use Twitter in general. That’s why I decided to create one just for my blog. I wanted to be professional and still be able to engage with other bloggers and readers. It also saves people all those tweets of me trying to make it through grad school.
More than Numbers
I’m sure you’ve heard it, number of followers doesn’t determine your worth. It’s 100% true. As a blogger you know that there is strategies to boost followers and get engagement. I remember having a conversation with a group of friends about the whole follow/unfollow thing on Instagram. (P.S. Please don’t do this, not a good strategy whatsoever). I kept explaining it as a blogger and saying how the changing follower numbers makes it hard to pitch to brands and such and true engagement. But they didn’t get it and honestly it made me feel so silly because why was I truly putting so much thought into my follower count and how many likes I got? I remember scrolling through pictures and even though I liked them, I wouldn’t post them because I knew it wouldn’t get that many likes.
Although separating them was a gamble on my follower counts, I knew that I would be able to have people who genuinely wants to see my content. I’m steadily growing on my blog accounts but it’s okay and I’d rather have the engagement over thousands of followers.
Here's why I separated my blog and personal social media accounts. Click To TweetLife How I See It
If you’re a blogger, you know how important it is to have a curated Instagram feed. Kind of like with Twitter, I began feeling pressure on what I posted on Instagram. I would like a random picture I took from a day out but I always felt like I couldn’t post it because it didn’t follow a certain theme. But that meant that a lot of great memories wouldn’t get posted because it didn’t fit. I didn’t want to create a “finsta” because I feel like those just seem like you have something to hide. It feels weird not being able to post my happiest moments just because it doesn’t have the same light or appeal as a flat lay.
Creating a separate account for my blog made it easier to post a curated feed and connect with other bloggers, while my personal is directed towards my friends and family and everyday life. It’s a good compromise.
We Don’t Owe Followers Our Lives
I watch a lot of YouTube vlogs because it’s a way to destress and it’s easy to just have them playing in the background. YouTubers share their lives on vlogs and you feel connected. But there have been times when they wouldn’t post videos and people demanded to know where they were. When the YouTuber posted an update that simply said they needed a break, speculations started and subscribers still wanted them to explain fully and would get angry. This probably happened with bloggers but I feel like I have seen it a lot more with YouTubers. A lot of them tried to argue that it made no sense for the YouTuber (I’m also generalizing because there’s been tons) to not tell them what’s going on since they put their lives online.
Here’s the thing, unless someone legit has a camera running 24/7 live streaming, you don’t know about their lives even if they post a lot of their life online. Your favorite actor, blogger, youtuber, etc. does not owe you their life just because you feel you know everything about them from what they post. As a blogger I share parts of my life with my readers but there’s a lot that I don’t mention. I may post that I went to Disneyland but you still don’t know exactly what I did there. It reminded me that privacy is so important and what we post online shapes people’s opinions of us.
As a reader, do you prefer to see a lot of your favorite blogger’s life? As a blogger, do you split your accounts? Would love to hear all your opinions!
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In general, I like seeing personal snippets of a blogger’s life on their social media. (But not everything!)
Because my blog is curated, I generally keep my personal life out of my social media. My cousins have asked me to make a personal Instagram account, so they can see photos of my life instead other people’s dogs.
Some people I follow have personal accounts separate from their professional ones and some combine them. I think it’s a personal preference. You make valid points for why having individual accounts for each would be a good idea.
I did the same thing, although for mostly different reasons. Obviously, I’d like to maintain some privacy from my followers, but I also like to have my own Instagram to follow my close personal friends. I found that they often got lost in my newsfeed with most of my followers (who I don’t personally know).
I really enjoy seeing into blogger’s lives, but I also have been pulling back some and learning the value in that, so I can totally understand why you would choose to separate them.
You’ve made some great points here. It’s something I’ve been considering just to have less Insta worthy photos posted to that account and so I can see my friends accounts more often.