When business is slow I can use my blog to create the impression that I am a busy real estate agent selling a lot of houses. Social media is a great tool for anyone who wants to fake it until they make it. I have watched agents act like successful agents until they become successful.
What I like about social media and the Internet is that I can be anyone I want to be. I can show people the very best parts of myself and hide most of the rest.
What I don’t like about social media and the Internet is that everyone else can do that, too. I see an online world of always-happy, healthy people that just doesn’t reflect the world that I see offline.
There are a lot of people who think what they see in pictures or on Facebook and Twitter is more real than it is. They see happy successful beautiful people everywhere. They go on Facebook where they see perfect families with perfect children. It is easy to get sucked into a world that really doesn’t exist. It is easy to compare ourselves to the lives we see only through the Internet and come up short.
What we see on Facebook can be mostly real but it is usually just part of the picture and only an edited an embellished version. We can’t see the mountain of credit card debt in the picture of the nice family vacation. We just see the smiling faces and the beautiful blue ocean and the sandy white beach.
There are people who have a lot of friends inside their computer, and those relationships are very real. In some ways they are better than our relationships outside of cyberspace. Online, we tend to surround ourselves with like-minded people who agree with us and praise our ideas and give us a steady supply of positive feedback. We seek approval, which is why there is a “like” button on Facebook but no “dislike” button.
If you don’t believe me, try disagreeing even in a mild way with what someone you consider a friend posts on a social site. I have watched people I thought I knew become total strangers when I have left comments expressing a different point of view.
There is a whole world offline where we can see people in person. If we are lucky they will look away from their phones, right at us.
My business is built on social media and on the Internet because that is where potential clients are looking for me. But I don’t want my life to be built on the Internet, because it isn’t where I want to live. I want to live in the real world, without always having a screen between myself and others.
Teresa Boardman is a broker in
St. Paul, Minn., and founder of
the St. Paul Real Estate blog.
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