This is one of the many ways you can play the game on social media, from Nikita Walia’s Thinking Out Loud:

“Algorithmic feeds reward velocity, recency, and conversational density. Under these conditions, singular excellence is insufficient. Cultural dominance requires saturation. As dakota rae lowe, Director of Brand Social and Influencer at Nordstrom noted, “By my observation, users scroll past so much that it’s a frequency game. You’re only going to drive lift if you can get in front of someone 7-8 times minimum, so it’s a numbers game.“

People make descions everyday, every moment. When they pick up their phone, they make a choice of which app they open. If it’s social media, it’s usually to be on social media.

Your message is one of hundreds they’ll see over the next 15 minutes, so capturing anyone’s attention is a miracle. And as you’ve read above, “singular excellence is insufficient,” says Director of Brand Social and Influencer at Nordstrom.

So “saturation” is one way to play the game – “velocity, recency, and conversational density.” Post often, and keep posting, engaging the audience right there on the app, and crossing your fingers that you might impress anyone enough to find the link in your bio and leave the platform.

As Dakota writes in “the answer to “social media is dead,” there are other ways to play the game:

show up in ways that are additive, participatory, and aware.

it’s not about reaching the most people. it’s about reaching the right ones.

This was true everywhere, in real life, before social media came along, and it will endure.

Busy week here at Social Media Escape Club!

On Tuesday I did a Substack Live with photographer Noah Kalina. You might have seen his recent work with the New York Times, photographing an old school Pizza Hut here in PA.

Find out how he landed that gig (and so much more) in the replay video.

After that call I hosted Tuesday’s CO-WORK ESCAPE POD – every Tuesday at 12pm EST, you should come!

This week we had nine creative people editing video and writing newsletters and more. Register for our next one here and get some work done!

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I talk about “having a website” a lot, so I’m often asked, “what’s the ideal creator website service?”

I’m not so sure anymore.

The more I look at platforms like Squarespace, Cargo, Wix, Framer, Weebly, I can’t help but think of the square peg / round hole problem. That there’s no really “one size fits all” solution, and sometimes these “easy” website builders are complex – even to seasoned web professionals.

I started Social Media Escape Club in 2021 here on Substack. It wasn’t until 2025 that I finally landed on WordPress for my website because what I discovered is that I wanted a blog, and I wanted it to work in a familiar way and that was WordPress, the other blog set ups just don’t feel right to me. But I didn’t know in 2021 that I would end up at just “doing a blog.”

So it really helps to nail down what do you need the site to do, and how does it need to feel? Because if you hate using it (like I did with Squarespace), you’ll never use (I didn’t).

I was asked “What does online presence look like for a producer who has a busy schedule?” on Substack Notes, and I figured I’d share the answer with the world wide web, in hopes it may be helpful to someone.

I think the online presence for any creative professional is trust building. Day in, day out, how do you put on display the things you know, the ideas you connect, the people you work with? And do that in a sustainable way?

Because if you start making 30 second polished vertical clips to get shared on platforms for people that just love scrolling 30 second clips, that might get eyeballs, but does it earn trust?

Or does having an archive of work, a body of things you produced, arranged in a refined manner in your corner of the internet, work better? Something that maybe doesn’t “get eyeballs,” but is hand delivered as a link to people who matter. Something passed around from people who know, with a “you gotta check out the work this person is doing” nod.

So I’m hinting hard at the “have a good website” angle, of course, but I think that more aligns with where artists can land, and soak in what you’re doing, and how you operate. Fill it with the occasional nice video talking about your work, a collection of albums you worked on, ideas you’ve discussed with people in and around your creative orbit… make it as cozy as the studio space you’d like to share with an artist, rather than frantically handing out flyers on a busy intersection.

The strategy of “post often, in many different places” just creates new work for you to keep up with.

Think of the four comments on the IG reels that you need to acknowledge.

Three on Shorts, maybe 12 folks on YouTube. Hurry, heart those comments!

Five people left comments on your blog post, there’s two email replies from the newsletter that are 4+ hours old, six comments on the Substack, 12 comments on the Substack Note, four more on the second Reel you posted at 12pm, then four more comments on the YouTube shorts after dinner.

And I didn’t even mention DMs.

This isn’t “engaging your audience,” this is a part time job pulling levers and pressing buttons in the casino machinery of social media.

Had a great conversation with photographer Noah Kalina today, about a variety of creative subjects.

We talked about his recent love for building websites to host his creative work.

“I use Claude code, but it has just been like this giant unlock for my creativity — and mostly in service of it. It’s like all of these pictures that just do not feel like they have a home anymore on the internet.

Of all of the sites we’ve been through — for me, it’s 25 years on the internet — I’m no stranger to seeing sites come and go and moving on or whatever. But now it really just feels like it’s all scattered and blown up.

There is no real one place anymore. But what does feel good is your place, your website. For me, it’s noahkalina.com, and then I’m making subdomains off of that.”

On the withering away of social media, and the return to personal sites:

“With the destruction of like social media as we know it, or at least the change in it, I think there’s nothing better now than feeling like, oh, let’s full circle back to our personal websites and like make them interesting

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I just make these up as I go along, flowing from one idea to the next (need to do another “get our photos off the cloud” meet up again).

I’ve definitely been influenced by reading Cory Doctorow’s book ‘Enshittification,’ about getting away from the megacorp tech companies, and this Focus Escape Pod is a proper step in that direction.

On Wednesday, March 25 I’ll be hosting a 90 minute Zoom call, and there will be a “cohort” on the Discourse platform (not Discord), too.

It’s not like I’m the super best instructor guy for this. Sure, I’ve been noodling around on the web since the mid 90s, but there’s people who know more than I do about all this, which is why I’m asking them join us and help folks understand a little bit more about HTML, uploading files, DNS, and all that fun stuff. We’re gonna make the “scary stuff” a lot less scary.

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“We have a problem,” I was told by the manager of the Platinum selling band we had in our studio.

The artist wasn’t comfortable with the writer I assigned for this interview.

This drops in my lap after a morning of pre-production by the studio team.

I didn’t know the back story, but something was stewing over an article from years before. In that moment, I laid it out; my writer is a professional, we’re all here to do a job, and we can either proceed as planned or cancel the whole thing.

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