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.
Love this from Mehret Biruk:
“I ask the empty page a question and every single time, without fail, to my utter shock and delight, it answers. You can’t hear such answer, your truth dying to reach you, when you’re spending all your time inside the deafening internet noise.”
This from Matthew Ferrara:
Imagine if you produced direct content as frequently as you produce social media content. But rather than 1% or 10% of people seeing it, it gets received by 100% of your audience. Got your attention?
Keep making Reels that 95% of your audience won’t see?
Or just email 10 people and reach all 10 of them?
Emailing 10 people means we might get rejected 10 times.
Making Reels is safer, knowing it’ll largely go unnoticed, but we still did “the right thing” according to mass marketing gurus.
“I do think that social media is largely a trap… for users and for brands,” says Seth Godin over at Link In Bio. “It’s purposely built to create insecurity and false proxies, metrics that get people to work for free to support the business model of the social media companies, as opposed to their own goals.”
Spending time and energy for “Likes” benefits the people who said “Likes” were valuable in the first place.
If your website is just a billboard, remember that no one gets on the highways to look at billboards.
If your website’s contents are just embedded content from other platforms and links to social media, it is a billboard.
I come to your website, and the only option is to… leave your website.
Imagine if I drove to your restaurant and it was just a billboard, with links to Google Maps, DoorDash, and your Instagram account.
It’s not just about the food when I go to a restaurant. Sometimes you strike up a rapport with the wait staff. You find something on the menu that becomes your favorite. Maybe the seating is extra nice, or the crowd on a Tuesday night is your vibe.
You don’t get any of that from a billboard. A billboard is for shouting HEY HEY HEY. DETAILS! WEBSITE ADDRESS!
Stop putting up billboards and expecting people to get excited.
As usual, Seth Godin sums it up in ‘Feeding the algorithm.”
“If you’re posting on social media or any platform with an algorithm, the real question is: do you work for the algorithm or are you committed to working for the people who want to go where you hope to take them?”
I love this; “are you committed to working for the people who want to go where you hope to take them?”
I’m off social media because I don’t want an algorithm shoving garbage into my eyeballs every minute. Sure, there’s sometimes a sliver of good stuff, but I’m no longer interested in sifting through garbage. Not for anything.
Some people are afraid to leave social media. Literally fearful. It’s the FOMO, not being up to date, missing what friend’s are doing.
I do quite well not knowing what my friends are eating for breakfast, thank you.
Listeners have unlimited options. They have probably 25 albums they could recite word for word and another 10 they put on for a good cry or workout.
Expanding on your “NEW SONG, CHECK OUT IT” messaging is the very least you can do.
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.
Most people would just rather log into one app and be spoon-fed “content” every day than be responsible for searching for, finding, and discovering new things to read and enjoy on the internet.
Social media made everyone think that there needs to be one channel, one source for everything. Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram are like the big three channels our parents had growing up. Like, “Welp, that’s it! That’s all the choices we have!”
But it’s not.
All this talk about discovery. Are you kidding? If you’re on social media, go find that one fascinating character. Now, see who they follow.
There – you now have 600-2000 people to dig through and find some interesting people doing cool things.
Yes, I subscribe to 322 newsletters via Substack. You can find a list of them here.
Discovery? It’ll take you days to sift through all those.
We used to discover bands from the thanks lists on cassettes and CDs, from the shirts that artists wore in their music videos, or from the ones they brought with them on tour.
There is a whole world of discovery out there that we’re missing because we’re letting social media algorithms dictate what’s most interesting.
We’re all anti-A.I. but we sure seem fine with computers influencing our taste.
