Building Community During the Social Media "X-Odus"
- Ty Francis
Six years.
By 2023 it had been six glorious years since my last post on social media. I’d deleted nearly every social media app from my phone and was savoring being free from the virtual obligations of posting, commenting, sharing, etc.. I had just mustered up the courage to delete the final boss known as Instagram (I was still spending way too much time “lurking”) when I developed the idea for ReSee Movies and decided to pursue my dream of revolutionizing the film industry.
It didn’t take long before my business planning let me to an inevitable, soul-crushing truth: if I wanted ReSee to reach people, I was going to have to be on social media. A lot.
My personal X-odus largely coincided with my move to Berlin in November 2017.
I won’t be so dramatic as to say that social media almost made me give up, but the realization did make me second guess whether I had what it'd take to build up this community. Six years outta the game is a long time, and on top of learning how to be cool, go viral, etc., I’d still have to struggle with the moral qualms of posting “content” and contributing to an ecosystem that I genuinely think is bad for people.
After some reflection, I resolved to swallow the truth that social media is a necessary evil for building a brand, and to do my best to build a team of people around me who hated it less than I do (Gen Z to the rescue). So for the last 11 months, that’s what we’ve done. But at each ReSee Movies event I've met new community members who tell me that they found out about ReSee via social media, their algorithms having served them my content with pinpoint accuracy.
Don’t bite the hand that feeds you, so they say.
Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Bob Iger, and Jeff Bezos have all made it clear they won't oppose the president.
Still, this moment in time feels different. Since 2023, the website real ones shall always know as twitter was bought by the biggest troll the world has ever seen who then quickly transformed it into a toxic cesspool. America has yet again elected a leader who stands for hate and imperialism (over a candidate who stood for…slightly less hate and imperialism 🥲). And with Mark Zuckerberg’s recent presidential kowtow, the decision to end third-party fact-checking on Meta, it feels like we are yet again at an inflection point where we have to decide whether we want to endorse these platforms by using them.
Sadly, I don’t foresee a future where ReSee is completely absent from social media; at very least, business owners need to claim our online reputations before some other nefarious actor does. And the numbers don’t lie when it comes to the efficacy of social media ad spend. They have us hooked pretty deeply, and that sucks.
At the same time, if you finally want to pull the plug social media, you have my full support. I’d envy and admire you for being able to do so. But if you do, and you still want to stay connected to the ReSee community, we'll give you other means to do so.
Mike and I are in the process of transforming reseemovies.com into a place where movie theaters, film societies, and social circles can build community through cinema.
Mike and I are in the process of transforming reseemovies.com into a place where movie theaters, film societies, and social circles can build community, reach their target audiences, and plan one-of-a-kind movie outings. We believe strengthening our communities, whether they’re in person and local or online and global, is part of the answer to silencing the noise social media has created in our lives. That process will take some time, so in the meantime, here are a few things we’ll start doing a better job of to give you alternative ways of staying connected to us.
Effective immediately, we’re launching our long-overdue newsletter, The ReSee Series. Expect an email every couple of weeks that includes news on upcoming ReSee events, industry insights, and human stories from our movie loving community.
Hosting ReSee events on platforms like lu.ma, beginning with the next Dystopian Dating event on January 24th. lu.ma cuts out the noise and gives you control over what you hear about, so expect a quick note there whenever we drop a new event.
Launching our new ReSee Berlin Telegram group. Yes, I realize the line between messaging platforms and social media is pretty blurry, but at least on Telegram we can set the controls to minimize the chatter and focus on getting you the event information you want.
- Join us on Telegram: https://t.me/reseemovies
- Listening to you. We’ll do a better job of connecting with you after events, soliciting your feedback, and using that feedback to make our events even better.
We would love for you all to tell us how we can best get the word out to you about ReSee events, our company’s growth, and other fun topics without dragging you into the social media circus. So if this blog post reaches you and you have ideas or suggestions, please get in touch with us. We’d love to hear from you.
Whether you decide to stick it out on social media platforms or not, remember to be a good human. And when you feel like shutting off your phone and tuning things out for a while, ReSee and movies will always be there for you. We’ll be waiting for you at the cinema with open arms.
