Welcome back to Tuff Love with Rob Kandell. This episode is all about the usage of social media. Rob has a long history and a love/hate relationship with the concept of social media. He was hooked on the concept way earlier than 2003 and 2004 when Myspace and Friendster began. Rob was building computer games at 10 years old, coding and saving on floppy disks. In 1989 he got to college where there were things called news groups, which were about anything from woodworking to Star Trek to porn. That was the beginning of the dopamine validation experience, posting things on the internet and hoping somebody would respond.

Rob’s addiction to social media started with Friendster, the precursor to Facebook. He started to advertise using it, for OneTaste in 2004. It was an advertising tool to get attention, but it became addicting.

Facebook arose in 2006 and was at first only available to Harvard students, and then released to the world in 2007. It’s now 2017 and Rob realized that for 10 years of his life he has used Facebook almost every day. Facebook wasn’t just a way to connect for OneTaste, it was also a way to flirt, and connect with the ladies Rob was interested in, a way to see high school friends. There’s a hunter inside, and Rob was hunting on Facebook for the next new thing, the next new experience.

Then there’s Rob’s business. He has been solo since 2014, building Kandell Consulting, which led to the debacle of LA Mother, which led to the creation of Tuff Love, the podcast you’re listening to. If that’s all he was doing, Facebook would have had a presence. But he is also writing a book proposal for Hay House and the main thing about the book proposal is that you need to have a platform. You could have the best book in the world but if you don’t have the platform to self-promote the book, the odds of you getting picked up by a publishing house are significantly less. So for the last 3 – 4 months Rob has been diligently working on his platform: Instagram, Facebook, email list etc.

Where it was a high level of engagement before, it’s now become a little ridiculous level of engagement because Rob’s so focused on the book proposal. It’s starting to make him feel a little ill. He’s sick of being bombarded by questions from other coaches in the newsfeed, but it also makes him question what he should be doing and starts getting jealous of their engagement. There’s an addictive nature to it. The phone is calling in Rob’s pocket, saying ‘check Facebook, you might have gotten a like.’ It’s a mix of business and pleasure, and of the elements of Rob’s personal life and they’re so entwined now it’s ridiculous. Something about the likes validates him. Some piece of it is always looking for a level of acceptance and connection.

So, Rob did some research and this is what he found:

There are more social media platforms than Rob had even heard of.

One article is called, ‘61 social media apps you should know for 2017.’ There are the regular ones Facebook, Tumblr, Instagram, Google+, Skype, Snapchat, Pinterest, Twitter, LinkedIn, Reddit, Foursquare, YouTube

But there are also ones he had never heard of QQ, Xing, Xanga, Funnior, Tout, Mixi, Douban, Skyrock, CafeMom

It makes Rob wonder, “Am I not doing my job by not spreading the message of TuffLove on all 61 apps?”

As of March 2017, there are 1.94 Billion active users on Facebook. There are 7.5 billion people on the planet.

60% of active users are on the phone

Of the 1.94 billion, 307 million are in Europe,

There are 83 million Fake profiles

50% of people 18-24 look at Facebook upon wakeup

Instagram has a mere 700 million users, and Twitter has 328 million active users

Rob’s question is: what do we do about this?

This is getting more intense.