The internet is a wonderful place and social media has become a huge part of that wonderment. The accounts we follow are visually pleasing and on point with our aesthetic, they’re enjoyable, but they are also full of motivation and little bits of insight. A big trend in social media lately is instagraming instagram tips and blogging about blogging.

I work in social media and a ton of the tips are amazing. They’re useful and they help you grow. When I’m doing work for companies I focus strictly on growing the audience, driving traffic, and interaction. All  of these things highlighted in these blogger tips posts.

But if they are so great why am I saying you should ignore some of them?

Social media is tricky because there are so many different uses for it. If you’re running a company your social media probably should be a little different then if you’re not. As bloggers we are a little stuck in the middle, some of us are selling services and have shops, some of us are doing promoted posts, and some of us are just blogging for us. If you’re strictly doing social media for a service or a shop, this might not apply to you, but if you fall into the other two, it probably does.

I think it’s important that we don’t get so carried away in the numbers that we lose why we started in the first place. I started to share photography, insights, and the beauty I find in my little southern world. There was a short period of time were I began to shift what my blog was, because I was reading a ton of posts telling me that I needed to do things a little difference. Here two examples of the tips I choose to ignore:

• Keep your blog in one topic or category, switching back and forth between fashion, advice, or photography is confusing and it will lower your number of followers.
• All of your posts need to have a vertical photo with the title on the image to make it Pinterest friendly.

I don’t want to get so caught up in selling myself that I change myself in order to sell. I love the idea that as a blogger you are your own brand. I think it’s a great concept and a great way to look at what you are doing, with that being said, I don’t think you can be your own brand with everything looking exactly the same, because everything in your life doesn’t match perfectly. I don’t think you shouldn’t be able to share your opinions in fear of losing followers.

One of my favorite thing about blogs is that you see a lot of the soul of the person behind it. I don’t want to follow tips that tell you to lose that in order to gain site traffic. So here’s to following the tips that let you keep the soul of your blog alive while growing followers, because your blog is beautiful and there are people out there who would think so too, so maybe we shouldn’t change to cater to others and instead spend more time finding those people you won’t need to change for.