"Promoting Yourself" On Social Media is a Trap. How to beat it.

The phrase, “If a service is free, you aren’t the customer, you’re the product,” rings truer and truer the more time passes. But I’ve noticed a funny thing happens when you break the cycle.

 Flash back to a few years ago, shoot not even that long ago! I’m a stay at home mom, feeling chronically overwhelmed. I’m trying to build my platform and claw back my autonomy that I felt I’d lost. But in doing so, scrolling between feeds constantly became just another overwhelming task on top of everything else. But I had a realization that changed everything for me.

I’ve grown my skills and passion over the past few years; I’ve slowly built my business; I’ve found my voice and the message that I wanted to share with the world, and now the eyes of the internet are on me. Now I’m left with an option: I can protect my peace and stay out of the fray, but pull the ladder up behind me, or I can take what I’ve learned and tell others in hopes to help other creative, sensitive people how to be successful in their own right without selling out. Without sacrificing their integrity or attention span.

The realization, the answer that every growth influencer is keeping behind their paywall, is simple but it comes at a cost. You’ll feel different, you’ll be different; and you’ll never see the internet the same again.

So stay with me here; you’re an artist. You paint or sculpt, film the process, and post it. People like it! You gain a following, or build a website and you start to see growth. It gets to the point where it can pay a few bills! But…it’s a slog. You have to promote yourself somehow and what else than making tiktoks? You figure out that to see meaningful growth you have to post two or three times plus a day.

As you scroll, you start to see all the tips: “Use this quick hook,” “Five seconids of B roll can go viral,” “Niche, niche, niche!”. But the growth coaches who are telling you these tips, aren’t actually doing that. They aren’t doing any of that! Neither is your favorite creator. Do you think sponsored posts are made with the plus button?

The first thing you need to do is figure out why you are on social media. I want you to think of the end goal. Is it to market a business? Figure that out. Are you teaching a skill? That has its own set of parameters. Do you just want to make sponsored content for clients? This specificity about why you are on the platform is the first step of freedom from chasing vanity metrics into obscurity while never seeing the growth you want.

Even if you want a dancing monkey gig! A forward facing entertainer, that’s great! Do it! Post the skits, post the songs all day long…until you want a break, or a vacation, or until you try to reap the benefits of the following you’ve built and  suddenly they hate you for changing.

Now, here’s the key. What I’m about to tell you is going to set a boundary between you and socila media that will protect your sanity and your brand in the long run.

Successful creators don’t just scroll TikTok. There is a separate app, called TikTok Studio, that allows you to make and edit videos and schedule them to be posted later.

Now this sounds simple, maybe even silly, but if you want to be able to post consistently without burning yourself out or constantly scrolling for sounds and trends to copy, you have to set it and forget it.

This  does something incredible. When you’re not worried about stopping every two hours to post something just so people don’t forget you exist, you can focus on just existing.

When I actually figured out how to schedule out a week or month in advance, my earing potential really sky-rocketed because I can be reaching people online while I paint. While I redesign my website. While I sleep!

Don’t think this is a whole passive income thing, it’s not. It’s still hard work. I’m not going to talk about all the best strategies to use because that’s not why I’m  here. I’m here to tell you to pick your best photos from the last month and schedule them out over the next month on instagram, and then feel the weight lift off your shoulders!

This frees you up to only maintaining Instagram once in a while. That means you can interact more, and actually have fun in that space because there is no pressure for you to perform. It’s already done even if it’s not live yet.

Now go! Run free! Your work is complete, and your art will go out to the masses and find your audience.

But wait a minute, nokw my account is doing the thing. Now I’m the one vying for everyone’s attention and money from a distance. I’m on there sometimes, but not always when I post.

I’M A BOT!

Yes, breaking free of the internet personally but not professionally does unfortunately involve automations that greatly contribute to dead internet theory, but I don’t think that’s bad.

Frankly the internet is half dead already. At least fifty percent of all written content is generated by A.I. and before that we were inudated with fake news and statistics of all manner and degree. It hasn’t been the passive gateway to knowledge that it used to be, for a long time now.

Nowadays it’s mostly used as a massive pipeline direct depositing whatever BS other people want you to believe, right into your brain. Then you’re supposed to parse through it; know what’s true and what’s not; holding empathy and accommodating everyone in every situation.

But it’s a trap! It’s an impossible task that nobody is actually holding you to except faceless strangers on the internet, who are probably bots anyway!

Look, I’m here. You’re here. It’s not all dead. But in order to make the internet fun again, we have to leave it. Don’t allow any corporations unfiltered access to you 24/7.

When you cut them off at the tit, and live your own life, and then come back and post that, the internet will come to life again. Or maybe it won’t, (Hopefully)and we’ll find an entirely new forum to share with everyone. My personal favorite would be pagers or landlines (or carrier pigeons).

I’ll be real. I got rid of my smartphone but my plan was always to have social media for marketing. It stays on my iPad which stays at home and I treat more like a laptop than a mobile device. But I still find myself wasting a day at a time trying to, “do research,” about what I should post next.

But it’s a lie! 1. If you find something organically that looks fun, cool! But the goal should be to post your work; post yourself and your ideas. Because nobody else is going to have them. 2. The research method keeps you scrolling instead of actually doing anything to change your situation.

My advice? Sit down and make a bunch of videos for a day. Just enough to post one video each day of the week, and schedule it out. You will have given yourself freedome to create more work, come up with new ideas, or make even better content. Quantity is the fastest way to get better skills, more skills, especially algorithmic marketing.

So, if you are an artist trying to break out into the world and show everyone what you’ve got, I hope this information really helps you like it’s helped me. I don’t want to gatekeep the keys to success because success is not finite resource, it’s an infinite well of potential for all of us.

Now, go create, and good luck!

Bailey with Dying Art Prints