Build your project on someone else’s platform, and you’re at the mercy of the platform.
From their website:
“For each edition, all participants share their artworks via Instagram by uploading their typographic interpretations of each letter and number to their profiles, while using the project’s hashtags plus the daily hashtags to submit their work and enter the challenge.”
See, IG removed the “Recent” tag for hashtags, so now it’s just TOP POSTS.
This means that if you were to tag your entry to enter a giveaway or contest, you wouldn’t be able to see all the entries, just the TOP entries, according to however IG determines what “top” really is.
Because of this, the next round is canceled for now (via their IG):
Instagram’s never-ending updates have brought many significant challenges and changes since we started, leaving us with the feeling that the platform isn’t the same as it once was.
In particular, the recent updates to hashtags, one of the core parts of the project, have made them almost useless (with no way to browse all entries and no chronological order), making it almost impossible to manage a new edition as we used to.
This is just another reason why you should always be using social media to drive traffic to your own properties, where you own the content, the system, and the relationship with your readers.
And for fucks sake, it’s mullet marketing, all the way down.
Look how cool and vibrant their Instagram page looks! Party in the back!
If I had Instagram I’d want to check out every single one of those types! So much color, life, magic!
The website is all business. It reflects barely any of the magical energy of their Instagram page, which is such a bummer.
Friends – Instagram is still just a webpage.
You can make your website look cool, I promise.
And then as a brand (37 Days of Type has over 400,000 followers on IG) you simply tell your audience, “hey, we’re fucking moving. Don’t like it? Well, too bad.”
“Yeah but, Instagram makes it so easy to follow and keep up!”
Does it? What the fuck just happened here?
When you post do you reach more than 10% of your followers?
If 90% of your fans miss everything you post, maybe Instagram or Twitter are not great platforms for communicating with people who enjoy your work.
Drive people to your fucking website. Companies like Instagram and Twitter do not give a shit about your art, your music, nothing – if you ain’t dancing and singing and pointing at words, you’re dead to them.
