Five Ways to Empower Yourself Regarding Social Media in 2025

By Shelley Burbank 

I'm adding art journaling to my life in 2025

The new year is just a few days away. As 2025 rounds the bend, many of us will consider changes and improvements we’d like to make in our lives, both personal and professional. I’ve known for a while a major change I wanted to make for both personal and professional reasons, and all of a sudden (or again?) I’m seeing other creatives questioning the same promotional “strategy” we all love to hate. 

I’m talking, of course, about social media, and I have some suggestions for you. 

If you want to get to the bullet points right away, slide down to the bottom of this essay, look for Five ways to empower yourself regarding social media in 2025, and skip the wordy stuff. Otherwise, read on.

Pay to NOT Play?

There’s no need to rehash the history of socials. We’ve all heard it before. Most of us have also read about the keynote address presented by Leonardo Bursztyn at the Economic Society of Australia annual conference earlier this year. (Lecture based on When Product Markets Become Collective Traps: The Case of Social Media by Leonardo Bursztyn, Benjamin Handel, Rafael Jim´enez-Dur´an, and Christopher Roth. (See 1 in End Notes) 

In this study, researchers found that university-aged social media users would PAY TO DEACTIVATE their accounts if they were assured that ⅔ of other users also deactivated. It seems that we don’t necessarily enjoy being on social media. We just have a fear of missing out. Not only that, we’d pay actual money to free ourselves from social media’s unhealthy, sticky, long-fingered grip. 

 Let that sink in. 

 [pausing ……..] 

Clock Ticking on Tik Tok 

Okay, then, moving on. In other social media news, Tik Tok is set to be banned from the U.S. on January 19 if something doesn’t intervene (like the Supreme Court) in the meantime. 

While “BookTok” has created some viral bestsellers that otherwise would have been lost in the sea of publishing, it doesn’t guarantee authors will earn a living wage from their books if only they crack the Tik Tok code. Like everything else in this business, luck on Tik Tok overrides effort, time, and skill. If you want to gamble on a platform, enjoy! Why not? But if you actually believe you’ll become a New York Times bestseller just because you went viral one silly reel about something unrelated to your book, then you might as well book a trip to Vegas and step up to a slot machine. 

So, yes. On January 19, I hope Tik Tok goes down. I hope every other social media follows suit. Sorry, not sorry. We were better off without them. 

Meanwhile, I’ve vowed to 90% quiet quit Facebook and Instagram (my preferred platforms with the most engagement and followers) in 2025. Meaning what? I’ll post every 10 days or less or when I have an announcement to make. I won’t be scrolling. I won’t be commenting. I won’t be engaging except to answer comments on my own posts. Again, sorry. But not really. Because I want social media to fail. 

What's Old is News Again

If I’m not going to use socials for marketing and promotion, how will my readers know when I have a new book for sale? The newsletter, of course. Year after year, I give lip service to building my email list, but I haven’t really focused on it lately because of Mailchimp costs and now Gmail and Yahoo! authentication issues. Now that Substack has solved my deliverability problem, working to increase my email list is my #1 marketing goal this year. 

Want a peek at my PINK DANDELIONS newsletter? Go HERE. 

I’m also interested in being invited to speak as a guest on podcasts. Finally, going back to the basics means writing and submitting short stories to paying markets like magazines and anthologies. 

Have I mentioned how happy and excited I am now that I’ve made these decisions? 

Every day I feel a little more like my old, creative self. Giving so much away for free these past years has demoralized and discouraged me. Taking back control of my creativity and how much access I give the public feels both freeing and empowering. 

In summary, here are some tips that may help YOU get off the social media hamster wheel. 

Five ways to empower yourself regarding social media in 2025 

1. Limit your social media posting days. This could mean you only post one day a week or two or even one day per month. Put it on your planner/calendar, then ignore the little app symbols on all the other days. Lather, rinse, repeat. 
2.  Limit your daily time spent on social media. If you must check your socials every day, set a timer. When the buzzer rings, press that little x in the corner and put your phone down. Go write something. Or take a walk. 
3.  Quit one or more platforms. Pick your favorite. Delete the rest. Or pick your least favorite and delete that account. Or put one or more on hiatus for a while and see if you miss any of them. More importantly, see if doing so impacts your sales or the open rate on your marketing emails or any other metric you can devise. 
4.  Slow your scroll. When you are on socials, limit yourself to posting and responding to reader comments. Do not scroll your feed. Do not engage on other peoples’ profiles or pages. The idea here is to MAKE SOCIAL MEDIA UNSOCIAL. Will your people be upset? Um, people are willing to pay to get off the darn platforms if everyone else does. They might, in fact, admire and be grateful. If not? 
5. Nurture a “don’t care” mindset. This might be the hardest thing, but training yourself not to care if you lose a few followers–or a lot of them–will set you free. There is little correlation between having a ton of followers and book sales. The favorite example of late is the Billie Eilish memoir. (See 2.) You can Google it, but I’ve given you a link below.

 I hope you’ve found this essay helpful and inspiring. Let’s ALL write more fiction and nonfiction and memoir and poetry and fewer social media posts in 2025. 

Happy New Year! 

Shelley 

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End Notes

1. https://theconversation.com/would-you-pay-to-quit-tiktok-and-instagram-youd-be-surprised-how-many-would-235180

2. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/07/books/social-media-following-book-publishing.html

This and That

 Is everyone all right, weather-wise and pandemic-wise? Here in southern Arizona where I live, it's sunny and 66ºF today, which is our reward for having to live through our summers. However, all my siblings are back in the deep freeze. My sister in Joplin, MO, was subject to a rolling blackout night before last, and sent me a photo of her thermometer on the deck registering -16ºF, with about a foot of snow. My sister in Tulsa went out to check her mail, stepped on the ice and, as she put it, "did a dance like Elwood Blues" before taking a tumble and bruising her elbow, and my Tulsa sister-in-law did a slider with her car right through an intersection while trying to stop at a red light, (both are okay). Below is the photo my s-i-l took of their front yard a couple of days ago. Fortunately none of my Tulsa relatives have lost heat. I can't say the same for some of my poor relatives in Texas. 

Photo by Donna Casey, Tulsa, OK

I have to comment on some of my blog mates' recent entries. John Corrigan's observation on Thursday about the process of writing is so spot on, so on the money, so to the point, that I'm going to steal it: "The path into the forest is never scary. It’s only after you’ve been in there a while and realize you’re lost that fear kicks in." 

I'm so delighted for Charlotte Hinger, whose The Healer's Daughter has won the Will Rogers Memorial Silver Medallion, a Kansas Notable Book Award, and was named a finalist for the High Plains Book Award. It's such a wonderful book and deserves every single accolade it is eligible for. Charlotte did say she wished she could go to Fort Worth to receive the Will Rogers award in person. My guess is her feeling is - not so much, right now.

I totally agree with Douglas's assessment of Bad Day at Black Rock, and of many classic movies in general. Classic movies were often much more adult and thoughtful. I could name many wonderful examples, but I'll confine myself to one, the 1944 noir thriller Laura, based on the novel Laura by Vera Caspary, and starring Gene Tierney and Dana Andrews. I often use that particular screenplay as a sterling example of suspense, characterization, and plotting, and if you haven't seen it, well, why not?

In other news, since my latest Bianca Dangereuse mystery, Valentino Will Die, came out on February 2 I've gotten several solicitations from newsletters to advertise my book to "tens of thousands" of subscribers for a week/month/year for anywhere from $29 to $150. I'm not familiar with any of them but checked them all out. I'm skeptical. Has anyone else signed up and had success with Author Week, Book Machine, Fresh Fiction, or anyone else? I posted this question on my Facebook author page and got no response, so if any of you Dear Readers are also authors and have experience with one of these newsletters, do your fellow authors a favor and give us the benefit of your insight.

And finally, since I can't resist another opportunity for some BSP, writers know what a relief it is to get a good review from Kirkus Reviews, a notoriously tough review magazine. But I'm pleased to announce that they liked Valentino Will Die. Whew! Their reviewer says: "A plausible and exciting premise, famous characters, period movie glamour, and a blockbuster ending."