A New Relationship with Social Media
Over the past couple months I’ve been working heavily on trying to make Instagram an overall positive experience. In the past I’ve had a deep disdain for social media in general. I limited my interactions whenever possible, only posted content about my music, and got off the app as soon as I could. If I had to make a post about something or another, I’d often put it off for hours, or even days. I’d maybe mention new releases once, if at all.
It really came down to a handful of issues:
The nagging feeling of not posting enough, or regularly.
The chore of having to create a post whenever I played a show.
The repetitive nature of posting on several platforms.
The constant need to spam content I’ve produced or made.
The need to actually make the content that I’m going to post.
When I first started making music online, it was around 2012-2015. All the talking heads online gave advice about having to have a separate account for your personal life, and your business/music. Create and use an account on every platform, as well as a separate YouTube channel for gaming, or music, or personal life stuff. A regular post would consist of me generating 10-15 hashtags, writing a small caption, and posting the same content to roughly 5 social media sites. This was all after being exhausted from editing the video and mixing/mastering the audio. Frankly speaking, it was mad just how much content I was having to create even after making the main content. This very quickly became exhausting and too much for me to keep up with. I slowly stopped posting as much, and really stopped using most of the platforms in general.
During COVID lockdown in 2020, I went through and deleted almost all my social media accounts. Most of them by this point had been abandoned and unused for years. The subscribers either unsubbed or ignored any videos/pictures I posted, and I figured it would be better for my mental health if I just stopped using social media altogether.
Since then, I started a bit of a music career. As I played bigger and bigger shows, it became more and more apparent that I might actually need to keep at least a minimal online prescience. To satisfy my clients, I would post once or twice a month on what shows I was playing. This made people happy, but it really didn’t seem like I was doing anything with the platform. My posts were still getting ignored and I wasn’t really seeing the purpose in it.
Around last November, I decided I wanted to try and make the best of social media. Maybe if I put some genuine effort into it, and removed my pain points, I could have a more positive experience. I had ideas for what I wanted to do, and figured a trial run would be a great place to start. With the release of my live album coming up, it seemed like a perfect time to shift gears and try something new.
To work, my plan needed the following:
Scheduled Posts - I tend to work in waves of motivation. Some days I’m fine with putting in 14 hours on a project, and other days I barely want to move. I needed to be able to schedule my posts and content releases ahead of time to take advantage of those windows of motivation. This will give me a buffer of content so it can seem like I’m regularly posting, even when I’m lacking motivation or time.
Improve My Focus - Posting the same content over and over again on different sites and apps is mind numbing and hard to keep up on. If I didn’t want to overexert myself, I needed to stay on just one platform.
Seamless Integration With My Shows - I can’t spent hours each week working on content for a social media post. Whatever I post has to integrate flawlessly with what I’m already doing and not create more work. I should be sharing the things I’m already doing, not making new things just to make them.
With all that said, I put together a bunch of templates for GIMP and used a program called Astrofox to make some simple audio waveform animations for various posts. I had just wrapped up mixing and mastering for the live album and figured that and the various posts about shows would be a great place to try out my trial run of social media 2.0
For starters, I had to really pick one platform I was going to focus on. I initially thought about YouTube. I could easily post my covers there, as their content ID system makes doing cover content pretty straight forward without having to worry too much about copyright issues (obligatory “I’m not a lawyer”). They had just rolled out their own feature similar to Snapshat’s “Stories” and were trying to push that hard in the algorithm.
However, I had basically no footing on YouTube. I had one account I hadn’t posted on in years that had ~30 subscribers. It’s also not very well localized to my region (South/Central New Hampshire) and I wanted to be able to point people to my shows.
My other option was Instagram. My account had around 400 followers, and I could reasonably assume most of those people were my friends, their friends, and generally people that lived around me. Also, there was the Meta Business Portal, which lets you schedule posts in advance, as well as cross-post them to Facebook with basically no extra work included. Facebook wasn’t on my mind, and I certainly didn’t want to be going against my “One Social Platform” rule. But having access to it for basically no additional work was highly appealing to me.
Having weighted the options, I went with Instagram. I’m sure anyone who follows me closely noticed a pretty sharp uptick in the amount of posts that were going out in late November to early December. I sat down and developed a bit of a pattern to my social posts, then used a couple days of high motivation to get all the posts made up before hand. All in all, almost every post was done over a period of two days and I’m much happier with it. I feel like I actually got to show off some of the work I had done over the past couple months, and also didn’t mentally drain myself for having to keep on top of everything 24/7.