For most students, social media is their biggest weapon in their societal armour. Parties are arranged via the medium of Facebook. Pictures from these parties naturally then have to go on both your Snapchat story and Instagram page. Meanwhile, you’ll need to take the time to tweet the following day to tell the world how rough you are feeling.
Unsurprisingly, with so many platforms to maintain and a lifestyle that hardly correlates with sensible behaviour, mistakes will obviously happen.
However, there are safeguards that you can utilise that will help rid you of these common errors.
Double-check
Here we go again… ! RT @edballsmp: Ed Balls pic.twitter.com/EhIPfbmQRo
— Ed Balls (@edballs) April 28, 2015
It sounds too obvious, yet how many times have you tweeted something that makes no sense or is grammatically incorrect? Twitter can look kindly on the odd, small mistake. Indeed, Ed Balls, the former Labour Shadow Chancellor, has a whole day devoted to him in the Twitter world following his debut social media faux pas. April 28 of this year marked the four-year anniversary of the event. But for every Balls there is an Oprah Winfrey. The queen of American television was tweeting passionately about the Microsoft Surface – a tablet/laptop – all the while broadcasting to the world that she was openly using an Apple iPad. It pays to double-check.
Ration
Some people can go way over the top when it comes to social media. You don’t want to swamp people with too much you. This isn’t to say that you should strictly limit yourself. That defeats the sharing objective of social media. View your outreach like you would a conversation. Nobody wants you to stop talking, but just leave room for others to enter the fray.
Drinking
In an ideal world you would not go on social media whilst under the influence of alcohol. However, that world is utopian, it is simply too hard to avoid the allure of social media whilst drinking.
Social media doesn’t have to be the enemy. The start of the night should be your main body of posts -pictures, status updates, tweets etc. The middle is where the quality starts to lack but you should, just about, be safe from any real danger. The dangers comes at the end of the night, a time when social media can be a terror.
A good rule of thumb is to not even attempt to write anything once drunk. Pictures are okay but they too deteriorate as time goes on. Facebook Chat can be particularly loathsome. Waking up to find you made a prat out of yourself to numerous members of the opposite sex is not the best way to start a day. Word travels around campus at breakneck speed.
Swearing
There has been a bit of an overkill with the swearwords of the English language. Using them too often detracts from their overall effectiveness. Cursing is great for emphasizing a point, and justifiable, but you surely can’t have too many points to emphasize? A well placed swear is 50 times stronger than a flurry of continuous f-words.
