The Perils of Social Media

By Jeffe Kennedy

My newest sexy romance comes out July 13th! More information and preorder links here.

It’s a funny thing, being an author and doing the whole social media thing to promote books. This counts – doing my monthly posts here at RMFW – talking about thoughts and my life. Occasionally mentioning a book release, as above.

But there’s a pitfall to social media I never anticipated.

No, not the time-suck. Not the trolls or the haters. Though those are all real things. It’s how doing this has affected my friendships.

The plus side is that I have a whole bunch of online relationships who seriously light up my life. Some of them I know in person, some I’ve met in person after meeting online. Others I’ve never met in real life (IRL). Then there’s another set of people, IRL friends, some I’ve known for years – like my high school boyfriend – who I rarely see or talk to. But they keep up with me online.

This came to kind of a head for me over the weekend, when my old boyfriend made a snarky comment on Facebook about how I had been in Denver and it would have been nice if I’d mentioned to old friends who would’ve liked to see me. The thing was, I nearly had mentioned to him – my husband even suggested it – but I was feeling miffed. We’d had an email exchange, which I initiated, where I asked how he was because I hadn’t heard from him in so long. I felt like he was terse with me, and then he didn’t ask how I was.

So I was kind of hurt and didn’t tell him I was in town.

When he made this snarky comment, I emailed again and explained – and we sorted it out. But he also said this to me:

I do care about you and what’s going on in your life, but I feel like have a pretty good window into that, following all of your online breadcrumb trails.

Which, I can understand. Except I don’t know about it! I suspect this happens with a quite a few of my old IRL friends. It’s easy to find me online. When I do see them, I’m often surprised at how much they know about what I’ve been doing. Of course they do! And it’s lovely that they keep tabs on me. It can be lonely-making for me, however, because I can’t feel that they’re out there.

Also, while I’m pretty forthcoming about myself online – after all, I started out as a writer of personal essays – I’m also pretty aware of my author brand. That is, I do present a particular face of myself on social media. It’s an authentic face, but I don’t share EVERYTHING. I don’t think people should. The upshot is, if my friends follow my life online, they’ll think that I’m happily rolling along. For the most part, that’s true.

But, if I’m not, if something isn’t going well in my life, I’m very unlikely to say so online.

I suppose the solution is to do what I did with my old boyfriend and be sure to reach out. Definitely more productive than sulking!

We’ll be having brunch in a couple of weeks, when I pass through Denver again.