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!
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.
Love this. How I felt from the very first moment I heard of ‘The Facebook’ from a German tourist I was chatting to one day in a New Zealand traveller’s hostel in 2006/2007.
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!
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.
Love this. How I felt from the very first moment I heard of ‘The Facebook’ from a German tourist I was chatting to one day in a New Zealand traveller’s hostel in 2006/2007.
No kidding.
Hell, the internet is a workplace I never expected. :) Or signed up for. Or grew up with, etc., etc.
Well said!