NETWORKING WITHOUT SOCIAL MEDIA

I spoke with Frederick Woodruff how a musician friend of mine keeps making connection without being on any social media platforms (above). Watch the full clip below!

Escaping From Social Media is Your Central Assignment in 2025 by Frederick Woodruff

My discussion with writer and musician Seth Werkheiser about his timely crusade (and new community) on Substack: The Social Media Escape Club.

Read on Substack

FOUR QUOTES TO PONDER

“Consistency is key. You can’t be in the right place at the right time without showing up consistently. You have to fail—and keep failing—until you succeed. People see Keep The Meter Running and SubwayTakes, but they don’t see the ten other failures that helped me get here.”

Kareem Rahma over at Feed Me.

“But over time, Instagram became its own beast. It brought joy, connection, and incredible opportunities. It also exposed me to the darker sides of the internet. Chasing the algorithm and the constant buzz left me feeling burnt out. And as I grew personally and professionally, I realized it was no longer a fit for who I’d become.”

Kel Rakowski quit Instagram.

“One of my favorite things to do is to reach out to people in my network and acknowledge the cool things they’re doing. A quick message like this can be a mood booster for you both!”

Max Pete on Substack Notes.

“If I have to throw a pebble at your bedroom window every time I do something new, reminding you that I exist, then I’m not doing my best to even give you a reason to visit my website.”

True in 2018 when I wrote it, and still true six years later.

WRITE HOW YOU WANT TO WRITE, MAKE A VIDEO TALKING ABOUT YOUR WORK, AND MORE

// FOUR THINGS TO DO

1. WRITE YOUR WAY

“Once I started trying to anticipate what other people would want, I lost my point of view,” says menswear designer Aaron Levine.

Don’t get caught up in how a newsletter to your fans is supposed to look. Don’t assume your fans want something short and sweet, or long and drawn out. You don’t make your art thinking about the audience, so don’t write and share your art in a way that forces you into form that is not your own.

2. TELL YOUR STORY

We talked about this in yesterday’s Escape Pod Zoom call (next one is Sunday at 10am ET), about making videos to showcase our work.

This doesn’t have to mean making dance videos, or shouting directly into the camera, either. Check out the work of Noah KalinaTaylor PendletonSofter Sounds, and ISETTA FILM, and see how they tell stories in their own unique way.

And when I say make a video, I don’t mean produce a fully-featured clip and upload it to YouTube. Set up your smart phone, or turn on your web cam, or make some voice notes talking the thing you do. Do this today. Tomorrow. This will help you when you get interviewed about your work, or someone asks you about your art at the local coffee shop.

Practice talking about your stuff.

3. USE A DIFFERENT FROM NAME

Is the FROM NAME that you use for your newsletter familiar for your readers? If not, people might not open it.

For example, here’s the FROM name from my Substack, which totally makes sense:

But on KIT (which I use to send out emails about Escape Pod calls), the FROM name was…. my name. While many of my readers know my name, maybe some don’t!

So if you’re sending emails for your band, it might make sense to use your band name, while if you’re an independent photographer, it might be best to use your name.

4. PUT DOWN THE PHONE

You can come back to this email later, but for now put down the phone, or close the laptop, get up from the computer, and do the work.

You know what needs to be done. You know the next step.

That email you have to send, the print you need to finish, the form you need to fill out. They’re all small tasks and I know they can feel super big, but I promise putting off the tiny things will only compound.

BTW: have you done virtual co-working? It’s where you hop on a Zoom call with other people looking to get some work done. For the first 10 minutes you discuss what you’re working on, then everyone goes on mute and works together in silence. Then in the last 10 or so minutes we get together and talk about how it went. I’m gonna be offering this in 2025.

BUILD AN OFFLINE COMMUNITY AND MAKE SOCIAL MEDIA COMPANIES SAD

Social media companies want you sitting on your couch consuming as many ads as possible. It feels like a leisurely activity, but really you’re working very hard to increase shareholder value for massive corporations.

Sara Eckel wrote about this in ‘The People Who Don’t Want You to Sleep,’

“Social media companies don’t want you to go out and have fun with your friends—they want you to look at pictures of your friends having fun without you.”

Eckel references the the book Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention–And How to Think Deeply Again, in which former Google design ethicist Tristan Harris says “You can try having self-control, but there are a thousand engineers on the other side of the screen working against you.”

Breaking this habit takes more than just deleting the apps. It takes intentional action, which is what Joi Katskee is doing.

Joi (pronounced Joe-ee) runs Electric Radio Club, a weekly two hour radio show. But she also started bringing people together in real spaces to talk about music (watch the video above for the whole story).

Sure, it’s always going to be hard work to get the word out and get people to come out, but whoever shows up, well, that’s who shows up.

This is the work worth doing because it builds real world connection, unfazed by algorithms or “reach.” Social media platforms fear this, since now they are the ones missing out, unable to monetize our gathering and sell our data to advertisers.


So how could you apply this to your work? How do you get closer to the people who enjoy your art? What does it look like to do that in s sustainable way?

Years ago I ran a Patreon for my heavy metal trivia project called Skull Toaster.

That was bringing in $240/mo, and I was sending out a lot of stuff every month. Zines. Mystery metal CDs that I’d buy at the local music store. People could sponsor questions, and I’d make those hand written THANKS images and put them on social media.

I did a few virtual metal trivia hang outs, but I should have done more. I hid behind the social media posts because I was terrified of getting my questions wrong in a live space.

But like 

Scott Perry recently told me, “fear is a compass. It only shows up when we’re pointed in a direction worth exploring.”

What would happen if you did a Zoom call with the people who follow your work? Or if you planned a small dinner with other creative people in your orbit?

Say we use the internet as a tool to make the plans, and then we close the laptop and build with the handful of people in front of us – then what?

What could we do that we’re avoiding because we’re scared?

  • Raise our rates? Fire that client?
  • Post that musical performance from our bedroom on YouTube?
  • Delete your music from Spotify? Delete Instagram from your phone?
  • Join that class. Teach that class?

And what are we hiding behind?

  • Making a dozen more vertical videos for 2% of your fans to see?
  • Updating our About page for the 20th time this week?
  • Spinning our wheels trying to get our website to look just right?
  • Waiting to reach a certain number of followers before we believe in ourselves?

You know what the scary thing is. Now go do it.

CLEAN UP YOUR LINK IN BIO, RETHINK YOUR PITCH, AND MIND YOUR KEYWORDS

// FOUR THINGS TO DO

1. CLEAN UP YOUR LINK IN BIO LINKS

If you’re still using one of those Link In bio services, take this weekend to clean it up. My god, I’ve seen some artists with 50+ links in those things. Do you expect fans to dig through all those? More choices just means your fans aren’t even going to click anything.

Consider putting all the things you’re linking to (YouTube videos, music, upcoming appearances, store) on your own website, then just simply linking to your website. One link to rule them all.

2. CONNECT DIRECTLY

Hardly anyone knows about your latest project, let alone something you did three weeks ago (or three years).

Send a link to three people and let them know about it. Doing this takes minutes and is probably more effective than posting on socials for 95% of your audience to miss. Send via email, text, or DM. Just be cool about it.

3. RETHINK YOUR PITCH

Are you asking people to “subscribe for updates” to get people on your email list? Maybe promising a 10% discount?

Remember, you’re competing with Netflix, social media, family, new albums, holiday plans, and a million other things – rework your pitch.

“Say, “follow our adventures as we leave for tour in a month. Sign up so you don’t miss a single photo of our adventures. Sign up so you don’t miss out on all our crazy tour stories.”

There’s a reason media outlets ask, “got any crazy tour stories?”

It’s because stories sell.”

4. MIND YOUR KEYWORDS

Got this bit from ‘Discoverability for illustrators’ by Tasha Goddard via Robyn Hepburn:

“While emailing is more about outreach than discoverability, I have heard that art directors and art commissioners will actually use the search facility in their email app (e.g. Outlook or Gmail) as a first point of call after any in-house databases – so they might type ‘room illustration, colourful’ or ‘collage illustrator, newspaper’ etc. into the search bar to see if they have been sent any work by a relevant illustrator.”

Keep this in mind when reaching out to art directors and venues and other people you’re pitching for potential opportunities.

Want some direct help and guidance? Check out my 1:1 GET STUFF DONE WORKSHOP, and let’s do some work.

INTERVIEW WITH THOUGHT ENTHUSIAST

I spoke with Thought Enthusiast about Social Media Escape Club, mantras, and Noah Kalina!

“hey… you don’t need to be loud and jump around and do stunts to connect and share your work. Like, you can just be who you are, and that’s enough, and even though the algorithm might not “reward” that, oh well. Being yourself makes it easy to sustain your work because you’re not wasting energy being someone else.”

Read more here.

PROCREATE IS MULLET MARKETING

More mullet marketing, this time from Procreate.

Business up front (static website, text, one image, tiny button), party in the back (posting a compelling video on Twitter).
https://socialmediaescapeclub.substack.com/p/make-sure-youre-not-mullet-marketing

I still have a Twitter account on my desktop so I can watch videos like this, and that’s a good thing because, of course, it’s not on their website.

So if I want to share this video with a friend, I have to send them a link to Twitter, instead of Procreate’s actual website.

https://procreate.com/ai

Rather than driving traffic to their own website – a place where they control the branding, the story, the message – they settle for this:

“But Seth, if someone wants to know more they can just click the link!”

That post on Twitter has basically 3 MILLION VIEWS, and if they’re lucky 1% clicked that link, which is 30,000 people.

On the internet you get ONE SHOT to pull someone. Making them click a link to somewhere else might sound like it’s not a big deal, but you can’t be clicking links all day either – there’s just not enough hours in the day.

I’d like if I could just send the link to the Procreate page, so a friend could check out that video, or at least skim the text to see their stance on AI.

I bet Procreate would like to have 3 MILLION PAGE VIEWS, too.

But Procreate will fine. They have lot of smart people working on this stuff, I get it.

So, let this be a lesson for you as a smaller business or artist—your video probably isn’t getting 3 million views, which means you won’t get 30,000 clicks to your website either.

I’m not saying don’t post it on Twitter, but put the video on your website, too!

P.S. my god, the video isn’t even on the Procreate YouTube channel (they haven’t uploaded a video in almost a year), which is only the second largest social network on the planet.

Statistic: Most popular social networks worldwide as of April 2024, by number of monthly active users (in millions) | Statista
Find more statistics at Statista

SELF PROMOTION IS MASTURBATION

Self promotion* is masturbation.
Now, self destruction?

Yes, that’s a *slight tweak to the original dialogue, but in the spirit of my anti-social media mission (and the founder of the Social Media Escape Club) I’ll allow it.

As I said earlier this year:

At this point, it’s not even self-promotion – it’s tap dancing, juggling, or card tricks in Times Square, along with 900 million other creative people doing the same.

YOUR ART NEEDS MORE OF YOUR ART

I believe a few things in my line of work:

Let people know what you’re doing.

By this, I mean when you have a new song, exhibit, drawing, or idea, you should share it with your audience or your fans.

Like Rick Rubin says, “make stuff, and show it to your friends.”

Let people know what you’re doing in a way that is as creative as the work itself.

Established artists can send out a flyer with a BUY NOW button because they have the luxury of being established artists.

Radiohead and Beyonce can drop a surprise album because they’re Radiohead and Beyonce.

You’re not Radiohead or Beyonce.

Posting “here’s my new thing” and a link gets lost in the river of content, because everyone posts “here’s my new thing” every hour of the day, week after week, year after year.

Meritocracy is a myth,” says Delon Om. “I always believed that my art would speak for itself- that its merit would earn recognition and validation. Unfortunately, I have learned that is not the case.”

It’s never been easier to distribute your work and get it seen by a million people by lunchtime, but because everyone can do that, it’s also never been harder.

This video from Noah Kalina documents how he captured a photo and made it into a print, which sold out in a few hours. To my knowledge, he only mentioned this offering in his video, which “only” got about 900 views in a month, but his work doesn’t just speak for itself. His work is the work, and his art is the art. It’s all Noah Kalina.

He didn’t just post “new print for sale” on his Instagram Threads and call it a day.

He spent many hours making that art and told his friends about it in a 100% Noah Kalina way.

Bobby Hundreds doesn’t need to write 500+ word newsletters, he’s Bobby Hundreds! He could easily get away with posting his random thoughts and links to new endeavors. But I imagine someone like Bobby has so much creativity coursing through his veins that he’s compelled to share more about the big things he’s doing.

QUESTION: How can your creative spirit inform how you tell your friends about your work?