Founder of the Social Media Escape Club
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).
This is unreal:
“MTV is a ghost. Its average prime-time audience of 256,000 people in 2023 was down from 807,000 in 2014, the Nielsen company said. One recent evening MTV aired reruns of “Ridiculousness” from 5 p.m. to 1:30 a.m.”
This from ‘They are TV’s ghosts – networks that somehow survive with little reason to watch them anymore,’ via Simon Owens.
Such a unique opportunity in front of us, if only we could all look up from our phones for fucking three minutes, shake out of our trance, and believe that we can make something great.
“Social media distracted me, where I didn’t have the focus to be able to focus long enough on the work … social media was too distracting, where it constantly interrupted me and didn’t allow me to get to that place where I’m in the zone.”
Illustrator Samantha Cotterill from Can I Delete My Social Media?
“I have one piece of advice: if you read a book you love, tell other people about it. Tell them face-to-face. In your groupchat. On social media. Even on Goodreads. Every book is a lottery ticket, but the bezzlers are buying their tickets by the case: every time you tell someone about a book you loved (and even better, why you loved it), you buy a writer another ticket.”
Cory Doctorow
I love this so much from “How Tiny Desk Concerts Became a pop culture phenomenon.”
Folk artist Laura Gibson felt deflated after her 2008 South by Southwest show in Austin, Texas. The Thirsty Nickel bar allowed noisy 6th Street revelers who didn’t purchase tickets to enter, and they had no interest in listening to the soft-spoken artist.
“Mid-set, I was like, ’Why did I drive all the way down to Texas … What am I doing with my life?” Gibson remembered. “I felt like ‘I really just want to go hide somewhere and cry.’”
Two folks from NPR were in attendance and offered Larua to come to their office and perform, and it became the first Tiny Desk Concert.
Laura had to go out and do something and it sucked. Yet she did, plowed through it, and it led to something else.
I think a lot of us had some great fun and success with social media back in the day, but then it sucked.
Laura (I hope) didn’t have to go back to play another shitty venue to keep her career going. She just moved forward, like I see a lot of other artists doing, leaving behind social media.
Yes, we made our connections, had some wins, but “going back to a shitty venue” isn’t how we’ll get to the next level.
(via Kottke)
“When should it be posted? If the event is tomorrow, the answer is not tonight. Most people won’t see it until two days from now – it’s too late. Like when restaurants post their daily specials at 6 pm – great, hope your dinner service was wonderful. I saw it at noon the next day, and it means nothing to me now, I wish I had known about it sooner so I could plan.”
Chelsea Bradley from ‘Your Content is Killing Your Brand‘
This is a response to a comment left by Craig Lewis on what of my Substack Notes:
how do you practically make that move to talking to those closer to you/simply putting out quality content if no-one is seeing/interacting with it?
If you never post on socials etc, no-one ever sees what you do. If you have an audience already, it’s cool to get stuff out to them and they will hopefully do you a good turn and shout about it for you.
But if you’re still building an audience… back to shouting into the void?
Craig Lewis
You’ll need to get 100 new followers on social media to reach 10 of them.
Or you can just get 10 people to subscribe to your email list.
New post for Social Media Escape Club coming on Monday or so.
Meta says they won’t recommend political content on Threads, and that “users who post political content can check their account status to see whether they’ve posted too much of it to be eligible for recommendation.”
As Nick Heer writes at Pixel Envy:
“Does any topic which has been politicized count? Are all posts about global warming, trans rights, healthcare, and intellectual property law considered political, or just those which advocate for a particular position? If advocacy is demoted, it likely benefits the status quo and creates a conservative bias by definition.”
And while this seems aimed at accounts you don’t follow, I don’t trust Zuck and company to throttle accounts that you do follow.
Years ago, “self-promotion” meant posting something on a social platform, and most of your followers saw it.
It was great when it worked!
Then came algorithms, and now self-promotion feels like a constant battle.
It’s not you; it’s the system.
You can’t post just once because 90% of your audience won’t see it. This is why I’d always tell people, “Promote your new song a few times a week, at different times of day!”
But then having to post, plan, and schedule starts to feel like screaming into the void.
Oh, and then Instagram says it wants videos. Twitter removes links. Facebook and LinkedIn limit your reach when you include a link. Also, don’t say “link in bio!”
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.
