Social media is a job we never signed up for
Your main job is making great work
Social media is a job we never signed up for, demands our full attention, and nags us to come in our day off.
We’re spinning our wheels on an unending feed of noise, where reaching and growing our fanbase will never get any easier.
Think about it - you’re competing with brands and outlets that employ teams with writers, designers, video editors, and people who handle JUST THE COMMENTS.
These teams are also updating and managing several social media platforms—places where you don’t even exist if you don’t have an account.
I’m saying this is a crappy job.
Maybe tossing promotional paper airplanes into the cyclone of digital content isn’t the best use of our time.
The social media platforms will continue to make it harder for you.
That’s their job.
Every day they place the proverbial cheese just a little bit further and further away, letting you think that if you post a little more often, using varying media types, then maybe you’ll get 10 more followers or seven likes.
Like I said, some brands, bands, and people make it their job to be on all the social media platforms.
So when you choose (let’s say) Instagram, you’re supposedly limiting yourself from millions of other potential new fans.
If you’re “only” on Instagram and wondering how you’ll ever “grow your audience” without it, well, how will you grow without being on TikTok, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, YouTube?
It’s like Ricky Gervais arguing the existence of God with Stephen Colbert.
There are 3,000 Gods, and Colbert believes in one.
There are multiple social media networks, and you believe in Instagram.
Ricky Gervais believes in just one less.
I believe in a website and an email list.
If you believe that social media is required, but you only “believe” in one platform, you’ve very close to “not being on social media” already, as you’re leaving out millions of potential new fans that could experience your work for the first time.
Not everyone is on Instagram. Lots of people left Facebook. Twitter has been a dumpster fire for quite some time.
But every smartphone comes with an email app installed.
Every smartphone comes with a web browser.
I leave you with this: your work should be so good that fans share it willingly on their social media networks.
Because that’s the nature of “getting the word out” - you make great work, and show it to your friends.
If it’s good enough, they tell their friends about it, and now you don’t even need to be on TikTok because someone else makes a clip talking about your work, which now brings you in front of a new audience.
But that requires making great work.
That’s your job.
Your job is making great work that people will talk about.
GOOD STUFF
I share the work of other artists and creative individuals in spaces like this:
“Buying things in stores is a simple trick I use to spend more time offline and increase my chances of chatting with real humans. Win-win. Nobody said real life would be easy.”
Mehret Biruk from ‘How to live without social media’
I’m Seth Werkheiser, and I started this newsletter 863 days ago.
Ricky is brilliant. My experience is that most people who claim that IG presence is unavoidable to reach an audience are people who started promoting their work on this platform relatively early when it was easier to grow organically. Now having thousands and thousands of subscribers, they can still see enough advantages of being on the platform and reach a lot of people. Even if only 10% of the people see the shared content, 10% of 100,000+ is a considerable amount.
Continuing to put effort into the platform may be logical for those people (not always), but I don’t think it’s possible to extrapolate their experience and claim that “this is the way to do things”, “it’s still the best platform” and “you can’t ignore it” - this information is quite simply misleading and incomplete. If something works for one person (group), it doesn’t mean it will work for everyone else, especially for those who don’t have first mover advantages.
The interesting thing is that even for those people Instagram isn’t necessarily the biggest business driver.
Recently I listened to a podcast by an artist who was explaining her Pinterest strategy. The surprising thing is that her website statistics shows that while 40% of her incoming traffic does come from social media, 60% are direct sources.
Moreover, the 40% are not from Instagram alone. Pinterest is actually her best performing platform, closely followed by Instagram (other sources of traffic are YouTube and Facebook). The important thing here is that Pinterest takes WAY less time to operate. There is software that allows you to automatically pin your content as often as you need without you having to put hours and hours into creating new content all the time.
A staggering 60% of her traffic comes from direct sources, which is mostly from her newsletter, blog and well-managed SEO.
Which leads us to the conclusion that approximately 70% of her traffic (newsletter, website, Pinterest) comes NOT from IG or other “traditional” social media platforms.
Even she admits that Instagram is very time-consuming and demanding.
She puts much effort into Instagram, I suppose it’s because she already has a large fan base there and the platform probably still supports her sales enough to continue being there.
For those who don’t have such benefits, I don’t see what’s the point. Frankly, I don’t think it’s worth the effort. Instead you can focus on other channels that you actually own - e.g. your website and blog or newsletter, combining it with additional platforms here and there depending on other factors. I personally see Pinterest as a part of my ecosystem, because it’s more of a search engine that allows you to both post content and interact with it in a much less soul sucking way. Most people use it deliberately to find ideas and inspiration, but not for mindless scrolling and there is no pressure to be there constantly on order to “not miss out”. But there are a lot of other ways to put your work out there.
Well!! This gets an amen and a hallelujah from me 😂😂 I'm not on social media either and I hate them all lol. This post in particular finally made me subscribe to you after chatting on Notes for weeks!