How to enjoy a spiritual life on Facebook?

I remember an old friend greeting me the first time I joined Facebook.  She said jokingly “Great, now you are on crackbook, we can share photos!”.  And that is how it began.

Over time, I discovered spiritual groups and friends that I enjoyed sharing posts with.  There were pages for my favorite products and great ways to curate the content I wanted to see.

Then business pages were introduced.  This seemed exciting to me as I was setting up a home-based spiritual reading business.

I could even connect with teachers who were offering courses and participate in real time with groups of spiritual people.  What an amazing tool for the spiritual entrepreneur!

The first let-down – Facebook Pages

Once Facebook business pages were available, I got to work learning how to direct my blog feed to my page and interacting with people.  It was a wonderful, (and free), way to interact and get the message out to a wider audience.

I still have a Facebook page you can follow but there is little interaction with it.  Most of that dropped off once the new algorithms came into play (see article).  I and many similar small business owners lost out to a bigger agenda.

The second let-down – new algorithms hit our personal Facebook Feeds

So like a lot of other small businesses, I started to use my personal Facebook feed for occasional posts, finding that the algorithms change had not affected that as yet.

Until it did.  It’s quite obvious if, as a regular broadcaster of media, you look at what is viewed on your personal or business page feed the most.  It’s promotions by bigger pages.  Often personal posts don’t get viewed at all because other people are also being blinded by unseen and unknown algorithms.

My 5 ways to enjoy spiritual life on Facebook

People with clear intentions can still use apps to great effect to help support their spiritual growth, or simple enjoyment of social media if that is your bag!

Social media’s original intentions (or perhaps my perception of them) are simply no longer a match for the work that I do, but I still love to connect with friends and groups.  So what to do?

Here are my 5 ways to get the most out of Facebook, spiritually speaking

1. Create a friends list and view your friends posts there.  You can create as many different types of lists as you want.  Here’s the link to do so>>
2. Save favorite posts and view them using this link, not in your feed>>
3. Like your favorite pages and view them using this link, not in your feed>>
4. Pick 20 spiritual groups and view them regularly.
5. Given the latest data hoovering scandal got to Facebook/Settings/Apps and delete any apps relating to quizzes you might have taken on there!  I have always been careful with quizzes but was still surprised at how many apps were lurking, some relating to quizzes I had backed out from.

Perspective

I always thought Oprah’s quote about media was extremely insightful.

I view media as a diet.  So the question is, what are you eating?

I prefer a quieter time on Facebook.  I hope that the latest data hoovering scandal is unpeeled to its’ core and that we all find out what really happened, and who is responsible.

I’d also like to see very overt questions being asked of Facebook users when they start a quiz, such as “Do you want all your personal information stored in this app and available to the quiz creators?”.  That might help spread awareness.  Which is, after all, what I wanted to use Facebook for in the first place.