Social Media’s Growing Wellness Trend: What Does It Mean For Social Pros and Social Profs?

This is a graph showing a stead increase in the search term "social media wellness" since 2012.

I taught a social media strategy class this summer and I was surprised to find most students were not very active on social media personally. At first, I was stunned. This was a social media class after all. Would you take a film class if you didn’t watch movies?

After getting to know the students I found two reasons for this inactivity. It was a graduate course with a mix of older professionals and younger students right out of undergrad in our 4+1 MBA program. The older professionals never really got into social media. The younger students deleted personal accounts like Instagram, Facebook, and Snapchat for negative personal effects.

To see if this was unusual, I posted on a social media professor’s Facebook group asking if other instructors saw this in their classes. The number of responses indicate it’s not unusual. Most professors notice students backing away from personal social media use and mention reports of people limiting social media to focus on wellness.

This is a graph showing a stead increase in the search term Google searches for Social Media Wellness have increased since 2012.

 

Focus On Social Media Wellness Is Increasing.

Social media apps have faced increasing scrutiny for their negative effects on youth. It’s been a year since the U.S. Surgeon General issued an advisory on youth mental health and social media. This fall an increasing number of U.S. schools are Implementing student cellphone bans amid a mental health crisis and decreased learning. I instituted tech limits in my classes after the pandemic due to negative learning outcomes.

A recent article from Very Well Mind shared the news that TikTok is adding automatic 60-minute daily time limits for users under 18. This may not be surprising considering the recent scrutiny over teen social media use. What was interesting is that the article also posed the question, “Could everyone benefit from similar time limits?”

The article makes a good case for restrictions citing a study from the Journal of Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking which found people who stopped using social media (Facebook, TikTok, Twitter, Instagram) for a week had significant improvements in their anxiety, well-being, and depression. The average age of study participants was 30.

Very Well Mind interviewed Jamilia Jones, a clinical therapist who says, “By learning to set boundaries on the time and energy we invest in scrolling through our feeds, we can potentially reduce feelings of anxiety, depression, and loneliness often associated with excessive social media consumption.”

Limits Can Help Users Maintain A Healthier Work-Life Balance.

In full disclosure, I had particular trouble writing this article because I kept feeling drawn to check my social media. That Facebook group and my LinkedIn. I’ve been posting about AI recently which has sparked a lot of conversation. I wanted to see if anyone else has Liked or commented.

Ex-Facebook president Sean Parker has admitted that Facebook was developed with the objective: “How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?” This led to features such as the “Like” button to give users “a little dopamine hit.” Parker continued, “It’s a social-validation feedback loop … exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology.”

Some return to social media to see how many Likes a post, picture or video got to feel good. Others, turn to social for news or to fill time but find themselves “doomscrolling” as algorithms serve up more negative content because it keeps us engaged. This can lead to anxiety, depression, and isolation. That’s the bad. But there’s still plenty of good.

What If Your Job Is Social Media?

Social media still has many positive personal benefits. It is also a driver of business for large companies and local pizza shops. We need social media professionals and I teach students how to become them. How do you strike a balance between professional social media use while guarding against negative personal social media effects?

Boundaries to consider are social personal use, professional use (career), and company use (posting for a brand). It’s easy for these to bleed together when all are accessed anytime, anywhere from the same device. Social media professionals specifically report having a hard time with work-life balance.

We’ve talked about the negative health effects from social media, and social media professionals spend the most time there. The field is changing all the time so there’s pressure to keep up and it’s hard to leave work at the office when social media is 24/7/365. Emma Brown at Hootsuite suggests several ways to avoid social media burnout.

Ways to avoid social media burnout:

  • Set boundaries. Have social media–free time. Turn off work streams after work.
  • Give eyes a rest. Eye strain can lead to irritated eyes, neck and back pain, plus can cause headaches.
  • Get up and move. Walk (without your phone) regularly for mental and physical health breaks.
  • Get some sleep. Sleep (without devices) is healthy and makes you more productive.
  • Structure time. Assign parts of your day to specific activities (one-hour blocks).
  • Delete apps. Make your phone a personal device. Manage brand social on a laptop.
  • Digital detox. Take digital free time off for a night or weekend to recharge.

Do You Have To Be Personally Active On Social To Be A Social Media Professional?

This question got the most responses in the social media professors group. Some clearly say that you can’t make students be on social media even for a social media class. But others make a strong point that you can’t be a social media marketer without knowing what it is like to be on social media.

Companies used to want to hire college students to run their social media because they knew grew up spending their time on social media personally. I worried that they didn’t know enough about the business side of marketing strategy. Twelve years after I began teaching social media strategy we may see the opposite.

Today students could be studying social media marketing but limiting personal use or even deleting social media apps. A survey of 18-to 27-year-olds found significant regret over social media use. While 52% said social media benefited their lives, 29% said it harmed them personally. In fact, about half of Gen Z wish TikTok (47%) and Twitter/X (50%) were never invented.

What about current social media pros? Do they need to be active on every social platform to do their job well? Or can they run social media business accounts on platforms like TikTok and Twitter/X but not have their own account to limit personal exposure?

What Does All This Mean?

I’ve been teaching social media marketing for over a decade, have created social media campaigns for clients, and have a social media marketing book. I have benefited from social media personally and professionally. I’m obviously not recommending deleting or banning social media. But I think it’s obvious we need more balance.

I resisted having AI write this article, but I did turn to Copilot for some ideas on how to find more balance in our social media use. I think the suggestions are a good beginning.

An image of suggestion that Copilot had for balancing social media use by setting boundaries, using technology like screen time, prioritizing real-life relationships, curating your feed, and mindfulness.
Copilot doesn’t use social media, but has good suggestions for us to manage our social media use. Generated with AI (Copilot) ∙ September 6, 2024 2:30 PM

Have you seen the social media wellness trend? What does it mean for you personally and professionally whether you are a social media pro or a social media professor?

This Was Human Created Content!

More Than Prompt Engineers: Careers with AI Require Subject Matter Expertise [Infographic].

This graphic shows that in stages of learning you go through attention, encoding, storage, and retrieval. You need your brain to learn this process not just use AI for the process.

This is the fourth post in a series of five on AI. In my last post, I proposed a framework for AI prompt writing. But before you can follow a prompt framework, you need to know what to ask and how to evaluate its response. This is where subject matter expertise and critical thinking skills come in. A reason we need to keep humans in the loop when working with large language models (LLM) like ChatGPT (Copilot), Gemini, Claude, and Llama.

Photo by Shopify Partners from Burst

Will we all be prompt engineers?

Prompt engineering is promoted as the hot, new high-paying career.” Learning AI prompt techniques is important but doesn’t replace being a subject matter expert. The key to a good prompt is more than format. As I described in my post on AI prompts, you must know how to describe the situation, perspective, audience, and what data to use. The way a marketer or manager will use AI is different than an accountant or engineer.

You also must know enough to judge AI output whether it’s information, analysis, writing, or a visual. If a prompt engineer doesn’t have subject knowledge they won’t know what AI got right, got wrong, and what is too generic. AI is not good at every task producing general and wrong responses with the right ones. With hallucination rates of 15% to 20% for ChatGPT, former marketing manager Maryna Bilan says AI integration is a significant challenge for professionals that risks a company’s reputation.

AI expert Christopher S. Penn says, “Subject matter expertise and human review still matter a great deal. To the untrained eye, … responses might look fine, but for anyone in the field, they would recognize responses as deeply deficient.” Marc Watkins, of the AI Mississippi Institute says AI is best with “trained subject matter experts using a tool to augment their existing skills.” And Marketing AI Institute’s Paul Roetzer says, “AI can’t shortcut becoming an expert at something.”

Prompt engineering skills are not enough.

As a college professor, this means my students still need to do the hard work of learning the subject and discipline on their own. But their social feeds are full of AI influencers promising learning shortcuts and easy A’s without listening to a lecture or writing an essay. Yet skipping the reading, having GPT take lecture notes, answer quiz questions, and write your report is not the way to get knowledge into your memory.

Some argue that ChatGPT is like a calculator. Yes and no. This author explains, “Calculators automate a . . . mundane task for people who understand the principle of how that task works. With Generative AI I don’t need to understand how it works, or even the subject I’m pretending to have studied, to create an impression of knowledge.”

My major assignments are applied business strategies. I tell students if they enter my assignment prompt into ChatGPT and it writes the report for them then they’ve written themselves out of a job. Why would a company hire them when they could enter the prompt themselves? That doesn’t mean AI has no place. I’ve written about outsourcing specific tasks to AI in a professional field, but you can’t outsource the base discipline knowledge learning.

AI can assist learning or get in the way.

I know how to keep humans in the loop in my discipline, but I can’t teach students if they outsource all their learning to AI. Old-fashioned reading, annotating, summarizing, writing, in-person discussion, and testing remain important. Once students get the base knowledge then we can explore ways to utilize generative AI to supplement and shortcut tasks, not skip learning altogether. We learn through memory and scientists have studied how memory works. Used the wrong way AI can skip all stages of learning.

Click the image for a downloadable PDF of this graphic.

I remember what it was like being a student. It’s very tempting to take the second path in the graphic above – the easiest path to an A and a degree. But that can lead to an over-reliance on technology, no real discipline knowledge, and a lack of critical thinking skills. The tool becomes a crutch to something I never learned how to do on my own. My performance is dependent on AI performance and I lack the discernment to know how well it performed.

Research skills in searching databases, evaluating information, citing sources, and avoiding plagiarism are needed to discern AI output. The online LLM Perplexity promised reliable answers with complete sources and citations, but a recent article in WIRED finds the LLM search engine makes things up and Forbes accuses it of plagiarizing its content.

A pitch from OpenAI selling ChatGPT Edu, says, “Undergraduates and MBA students in Professor Ethan Mollick’s courses at Wharton completed their final reflection assignments through discussions with a GPT trained on course materials, reporting that ChatGPT got them to think more deeply about what they’ve learned.”  This only works if the students do the reading and reflection assignments themselves first.

Outsourcing an entire assignment to AI doesn’t work.

A skill I teach is situation analysis. It’s a foundation for any marketing strategy or marketing communications (traditional, digital, or social) plan. Effective marketing recommendations aren’t possible without understanding the business context and objective. The result of that situation analysis is writing a relevant marketing objective.

As a test, I asked ChatGPT (via Copilot) to write a marketing objective for Saucony that follows SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound) guidelines. It recommended boosting online sales by targeting fitness enthusiasts with social media influencers. I asked again, and it suggested increasing online sales of trail running shoes among outdoor enthusiasts 18-35 using social media and email.

Then I asked it to write 20 more and it did. Options varied: focusing on eco-friendly running shoes for Millennials and Gen Z, increasing customer retention with a loyalty program, expanding into Europe, increasing retail locations, developing a new line of women’s running shoes, and increasing Saucony’s share of voice with a PR campaign highlighting the brand’s unique selling propositions (USP). It didn’t tell me what those USPs were.

Which one is the right answer? The human in the loop would know based on their expertise and knowledge of the specific situation. Generated with AI (Copilot) ∙ July 2, 2024 at 3:30 PM

I asked Copilot which is best. It said, “The best objectives would depend on Saucony’s specific business goals, resources, and market conditions. It’s always important to tailor the objectives to the specific context of the business. As an AI, I don’t have personal opinions. I recommend discussing these objectives with your team to determine which one is most suitable for your current needs.” If students outsource all learning to LLMs how could they have the conversation?

To get a more relevant objective I could upload proprietary data like market reports and client data and then have AI summarize. But uploading Mintel reports into LLMs is illegal and many companies restrict this as well. Even if I work for a company that has built an internal AI system on proprietary data its output can’t be trusted. Ethan Mollick has warned that many companies building talk-to-your document RAG systems with AI need to test the final LLM output as it can produce many errors.

I need to be an expert to test LLM output in open and closed systems. Even then I’m not confident I could come up with truly unique solutions based on human insight If I didn’t engage information on my own. Could I answer client questions in an in-person meeting with a brief review of AI-generated summaries and recommendations?

AI as an assistant to complete assignments can work.

For the situation analysis assignment, I want students to know the business context and form their own opinions. That’s the only way they’ll learn to become subject matter experts. Instead of outsourcing the entire assignment, AI can act as a tutor. Students often struggle with the concept of a SMART marketing objective. I get a lot of wrong formats no matter how I explain it.

I asked GPT if statements were a marketing objective that followed SMART guidelines. I fed it right and wrong statements. It got all correct. It also did an excellent job of explaining why the statement did or did not adhere to SMART guidelines. Penn suggests explain it to me prompts to tell the LLM it is an expert in a specific topic you don’t understand and ask it to explain it to you in terms of something you do understand. This is using AI to help you become an expert versus outsourcing your expertise to AI.

ChatGPT can talk but can it network?

Last spring I attended a professional business event. We have a new American Marketing Association chapter in our area, and they had a mixer. It was a great networking opportunity. Several students from our marketing club were there mingling with the professionals. Afterward, a couple of the professionals told me how impressed they were with our students.

These were seniors and juniors. They had a lot of learning under their belts before ChatGPT came along. I worry about the younger students. If they see AI as a way to outsource the hard work of learning, how would they do? Could they talk extemporaneously at a networking event, interview, or meeting?

Will students learn with the new AI tools that summarize reading, transcribe lectures, answer quiz questions, and write assignments? Or will they learn to be subject matter experts who have discerned via AI Task Frameworks and AI Prompt Frameworks the beneficial uses of AI making them an asset to hire? In my next post, the final in this 5 part AI series, I share a story that inspired this AI research and explore how AI can distract from opportunities for learning and human connection.

This Was Human Created Content!