Why you should not delete that social media account

My girlfriend carps about how Facebook is causing her to waste time. More than once she has threatened to delete her Facebook account. But she always doesn't. It's been hard to convince her to stay present on social media.

I'm writing this to win her and a number of other people who are always on the verge of logging out of social media forever.

Now, some people have a genuine aversion towards social media for the reason that people online are 'just' stalking one another or faking faces or because to them spending some time online is synonymous with wasting valuable time or because Facebook is using our personal information to make money.

Ok well, I take issue with those things as well. Yes, people are faking faces and they are stalking each other thanks to Facebook, Instagram, and snapchat.

Yes, social media can derail you from doing productive work. Yes, 500 terabytes of our personal data flow into Facebook every day and it mints billions of dollars from this data. And yes that can creep you out. These are valid reasons to quit. Just like my girlfriend, they have a valid reason to quit social media as well but here's the reason why I stick to social media.

Last year there were over 100,000 reactions to my Facebook profile posts and over 50,000 (some organic, some paid for) to my page posts. My posts were probably viewed 1000,000 times because not everyone who views your post is going to tap their finger on it.

These numbers matter to me because I'm a published writer, an engineering student, an entrepreneur and a changemaker.

I sell my books almost entirely on social media. I get information on developments in engineering by just liking relevant pages or belonging to the right groups on social media. As an entrepreneur who runs an online shop, social media is my biggest market.

As a young changemaker, I vouch for different humanitarian causes on social media. I successfully ran a fundraising campaign for a young girl who needed financial aid to go to school on M-Changa thanks to Facebook and Whatsapp

Facebook is an incredibly great marketplace for selling ideas or actual products and services and lobbying for humanitarian causes. It is increasingly becoming the internet. You can virtually search anything on Facebook. Where do we get news, events and job alerts? Where do we go to laugh at memes? It's on social media.

I'm usually applying for things: conferences, events, grants, scholarships. Some of these applications require a link to your social media. It is a growing trend I'm seeing. Why is that?

Social media is a momentous opportunity to audition yourself and build a personal brand.

It is a great tool for networking. It enables you to reach the people you share interests with.

For businesses, social media presents such a big market.

Finally, it can be a source of meaningful information from inspiration to science to religion.

If you have been contemplating deleting your social media accounts, rethink.