Founder of the Social Media Escape Club
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.
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.
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.
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.
“Even if all you can manage today is five minutes, a minute, a split second, practice You; Sitting With Yourself to know all that you need to know. Until one day, years later, you look around and there’s no Twitter. No avatars. No fucking way.”
Mehret Biruk
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?
When anyone asks me how to get more subscribers, I tell them by making sure their current subscribers love the emails they send. Like Seth Godin says, “would anyone miss you if you stopped showing up?”
Today I wrote how 33 minutes a day on social media equals 200 hours, and that’s the amount of time it took me to run 1,105 miles in 2020.
I then suggest we do a bunch of things that “only” require 33 minutes a day, such as devoting 33 minutes a day to connecting and talking and reaching out to the good people in your life.
“Consider that we don’t think twice about uploading our original photos and text to a platform that sells advertising around our unpaid labor while limiting the number of our friends (or potential clients) who will ever see it, thus incentivizing us to either spend more of our time (a finite resource) on the platform “engaging,” or spending actual money to “boost” our posts so more people might see it.”
While 33 minutes sounds like a lot, we toss that time out the window every single day scrolling through dumb videos and memes.
Read it here: Spend time on good things and good people
What if the people receiving your emails forwarded it to friends? What if they copied the text from it and posted it on social media? What if your words traveled from the inbox into Facebook group chats and meeting rooms?
When was the last time you sent a newsletter that got 10 replies?
If none of those things happened — not even close— maybe getting more subscribers isn’t the answer.
From social media to Substack Notes, people post in the void. No comments, likes, or engagement of any kind.
Hey, sometimes things don’t work!
Your “questions to everyone” or “open invites” have good intentions, but after a dozen or so attempts, it’s time to reassess your strategy.
Stop asking “everyone” and start actually asking people.
➡️ Reply to someone else’s post. Go into the comments section of another post, or another Tweet, and reply there. Be the person that people love seeing in the comments section by being insightful, gracious, and / or funny.
➡️ Email someone directly in your network. If you’re hoping those people even see your original post and take the time to reply is a long shot. Instead, reach out and ask them. Say you’re looking for their insight for an upcoming post.
➡️ Invite someone before inviting everyone. If you’re just getting started in hosting video hangouts, live sessions, or workshops, consider inviting a few people you know directly. See if you can get three people to commit before announcing to “everyone.”
➡️ Go beyond “just sharing” and make it a big deal. Make a whole post about it. Go deeper than typing “THIS,” and explain why this piece resonated. Don’t just “curate your feed,” rolling the dice hoping that 10% of your audience might see it. Take the time to write about something (or make a video or an audio snippet), and share it directly with your audience in an upcoming newsletter (where 99% of your subscribers will see it in their inbox).
“Yeah, but Seth, I just want to post my thing and go do other things,” you might say.
Well, you see the results that “just posting” gets you.
Also, how can talking to your fans, audience, and readers be a waste of time?
Setting a timer for 15 minutes and communicating with real people five days a week will probably get you more results than the hour you spend making one Reel for 153 “people” to see (and which will never be seen again after 12 hours).
Does it scale? Fuck scale, do the work.
The strategy of “just posting” ain’t working, and it’s not going to get any easier to reach your fans in that way as we roll into the second half of 2024.
Social media rotted our brains on the instant gratification racket.
“I accept defeat,” I repeat after HINDZ from a recent video, “I accept that billion-dollar corporations have invested millions and millions of millions into the psychology and understanding how to keep me on these devices on their platforms, and it works.”
It’s not enough that social media gobbles up our attention – it tricks us into thinking we’re nothing without them.
This is made worse because “the creative status quo has made us lonely content machines.”
We are isolated, working on projects alone in our studios and rooms. We are so in our own heads that when we get together to discuss these things, we can cry.
We’re trying to figure this out on our own, thinking we’ll beat the tech bros with better-crafted hashtags, disguising our “link in bio” text, or churning out vertical videos to appease the social media overlords.
If we just read one more social media strategy guide, or watch more one more YouTube video then we’ll crack the code.
No, thanks.
I’d rather spend my time in deeper connection with good people.
Start reaching out to fellow zine writers, artists, photographers, and designers – get on a phone call, plan a meetup, gather in secret in remote parks, commandeer several tables at the local Denny’s, plan your own hyper-niche flea market, write a short skit.
These are things made outside of isolation.
Spending more time around creative people will do us more good than if we just sit on our hands and wait to be saved by the next tech-bro platform to deliver us a new magical marketing machine.
Are we so powerless to change the current situation that we sit back and hope somebody else fixes everything?
And then what? That person will sell the company to a Nabisco+Tide hedge fund subsidiary, and we’ll be back where we started.
Maybe centralized kingdoms of power and influence aren’t the answer.
The answer is other people, community, and the exchange of ideas away from the supposed champions of our “creator economy,” which was here long before the silicon valley dorks showed up.
You can wait for things to change, but reaching your fans on social media will never get any easier. NEVER. I’ve been saying this since 2021.
Find some other weirdos, form your own band of misfits and start having the conversation about living in a post-social media world, ‘cuz baby it’s coming.
My first few Threads on Substack were duds, but then I flipped them upside down.
Not only is it a fun way to get input from your friends, but it’s great for learning about your readers (and way more fun than surveys).
