Social media | Not Just Sassy on the Inside

I’ve been fascinated for a while by the disdain most people on Twitter (and among many who’ve migrated to Post or Mastodon) seem to have for Facebook. While I agree that Zuckerberg is an a** and would prefer not to support him, Facebook serves a completely different purpose for me than Twitter (now Mastodon, Post) and I can’t talk people there into moving…

On Twitter, Mastodon and Post I am in a world of people I don’t know irl and am mainly staying informed about and engaging in discussion of politics, political philosophy, etc. Plus, you know, the animal pics 🙂

I’ve kept Facebook devoted entirely to people I know in real life aside from occasionally accepting friend requests from people who know lots of other people I know (and I usually wind up meeting them at some point). There are friends from elementary school, high school, college, almost every town I’ve lived in and several spiritual organizations with which I’ve been connected.

Because I’ve always been a hippie and always found my way to hippies and/or people on a deeply spiritual path, 99% of the folks on my Facebook list are progressives and the majority also meditate or chant or follow Buddhist philosophy, etc.

My feed is full of inspiring memes, interesting articles on politics and climate science, etc. Even more endearing are the posts that keep me apprised of the lives of friends from all stages of my life. The kitchen remodel, the Christmas tree, the party with grandchildren…

Although I use Zoom and Skype more, I also Facetime with dear ones and occasionally someone uses the call feature to reach me.

The spiritual center I belonged to in Lexington has a page and a community group and I can stay in touch with people as well as watch the weekly service on FB or YouTube.

Following Deva Premal and Miten led to finding out about and joining the Global Gayatri Sangha and I’ve been singing the Gayatri with folks from around the world on Saturdays ever since. The group also does a lot of mutual support via FB as well as the sangha’s app.

Following Krishna Das led to joining his Thursday satsang every week and being reminded of them via his posts. And joining the Spirit Rock group means I get a notice whenever Jack Kornfield is giving a dharma talk.

A lot of people talk about FB as toxic and full of trolls, etc. but my friends and I have curated our lists and created a warm and kind space to hang out in. For me it’s a major place of connecting and feels a bit deeper because much of the connecting is with people I know.

Since I know a number of my fellow bloggers are on Facebook too, I’m interested in your experience.

As I’ve been preparing to publish a series of small books for Kindle I’ve been doing research on marketing books, which these days leads to looking into social networking. I’ve been doing my due diligence — I must admit not always enthusiastically. And a lot of questions keep rolling around in my head that leave me longing for feedback from other spiritual blogging types.

One thing that keeps running through my head is that if I want to market my things through Twitter and blogging, etc. that I feel I should help other people along. Not just follow, but share their posts about their products, buy products, etc. I’ve been trying to do more and more to support others who are trying to

I notice that there are many ways people do this. Some endlessly market themselves but don’t seem to ever do anything to support their followers or their products. There are some who are very generous in spreading the word about their peers. So one piece I’m interested in is what others think about the question of supporting others in the way “you” want to be supported and whether you think it matters business-wise.

The other is a feeling I keep having that marketing to the spiritual community is somehow different from marketing to the mainstream. I’ve been hunting for evidence on this but so far everything I find that relates to marketing spiritual stuff is advice for reluctant healers, etc. on getting over aversion to marketing. I know I don’t respond well to a lot of mainstream marketing tricks and most of my spiritual community feel the same way but I can’t find any advice on specifically marketing spiritual stuff.

Is your experience that there’s anything different about marketing to the spiritual community? Do any of you know of a good source of info about how best to market spiritually-related products? Anyone think there’s no difference? I’m very interested to hear what you know and/or feel about this.