Baby Boomers – You Can Learn Social Media
Baby Boomers - learning social media is not that hard. If I can do it, so can you.
Here I am – an old fogy in her 60s – finding myself not only doing social media, teaching others how to do it, but am now running the social media side of a campaign for a young congressional candidate who is half my age.
I know nothing of geek speak – in fact am truly intimidated by the younger generation and all their acronyms. I don’t understand about bits and bytes, writing code and had to have my granddaughters teach me how to text message less than two years ago.
Luckily, I am computer literate when it comes to a number of programs. For example, one thing I have found is that if you know one or two programs in Microsoft Office – in my case Word and PowerPoint - it makes it a lot easier to learn others as they have many features in common. I too have been able to take that knowledge over into other software programs.
So How Did I Learn Social Media?
I first started with Facebook a little over a year ago because someone told me it was a good way to get my name out there, business-wise. Once I joined, I came across friends and family that I hadn’t seen in years. I met family I didn’t even know existed. So my “friends” list grew. I never got addicted to the games, couldn’t care less what someone ate for breakfast and, for quite awhile, literally had no idea how this could help me in business.
Several months later, I stumbled onto LinkedIn because someone asked me to join. I soon learned enough about “groups” to decide that I should become part of some pertinent to my business. I then started getting email notifications about “discussions” from those groups. Unfortunately, I didn’t keep up with very many of those discussions. Looking back now, I realize I missed a lot of useful educational information and networking opportunities.
Twitter was another world altogether. For quite awhile I couldn’t understand what all the hype was about. But I was asked to follow a person I admire so I joined. He sent me several “tweets” but I had no idea what to do with them or how to write a “tweet”. Then to my amazement several people started following me, which was a joke for there was literally nothing to follow. The turning point came when I went to a convention in early September. At the opening ceremony we were told we could follow the events of the convention if we just logged on. As I couldn’t even remember what my user name and password were, it took me two days to figure out how to get on. By that time the convention was over. I felt like a fool – came home convinced that would never happen again. Since then, I have completed three different certification courses, read every book I could get my hands on and have become a huge advocate of social media.
Learning Social Media can be a challenge for baby boomers and other seniors. But in keeping up with today’s world it can be a necessary one.
