Think about your family’s best stories. What are the stories that get told and retold during family gatherings — those stories that are passed down from generation to generation, father to son, mother to daughter. These are the stories that family legend are made of.
There is no reason you can’t have stories like that yourself, or that they need to say only with you. That’s one of the cool things social media has let us do is to share those stories with each other.
But here’s the important thing: you have to tell these stories. You have to be willing to share those stories with people. Whether it’s writing it up as a blog post, posting it on Facebook, or letting your videos and pictures tell the story for you and putting them online for others to see and share.
If you’re not comfortable sharing certain parts of your life, don’t share them. No one said you had to tell everything you were doing, show photos of every aspect of your life, or reveal every personal detail you’d rather keep private.
“There are just some things I don’t want people to know about,” we often hear from social media resisters.
That’s fine, don’t share those things. If you don’t want people to know where you live, don’t put your house on Foursquare. If you don’t want people to know you’re on vacation, don’t post photos to Facebook while you’re out.
Choose the parts of your life you want to share with people, and make it available for people to read, watch, and enjoy. Share the parts of your life that you feel comfortable sharing, and keep the rest of the stuff private. Rather than relying on the ever-changing, always-complex Facebook privacy settings to keep your stuff hidden, just don’t put it up.
Just remember that in order to build relationships with people and get them to know and like you, you need to reveal some parts of yourself to make yourself seem more human. That’s where sharing your memories and stories, through blogging, status updates, tweets, photos, and videos, are all going to help you with this.
Learn more in Branding Yourself.
Anna Pham
Sometimes I saw people shared their stories, but some sounds hepful and true but some sounds so fake, so it really depends on how you manage to tell the story,