Category: sethwCategory: sethw

I should find more views like this and watch fewer Adam Mosseri videos.

The head of Instagram was explaining why they’re not adding links to post (I removed the video). My friend Dino Corvino is right; who cares?

Instagram and Meta are big corporations doing whatever they want to increase shareholder value. Your local ISP, Netflix and every other service we use (including Substack) will do the same.

My answer? Control what I can control.

I saw too many emails from LinkedIn and scrolled through too many “ways to save the music industry” mega posts than I can put up with.

So, I deleted LinkedIn.

I deleted Twitter last summer.

I deleted Instagram on the first day of 2024.

They’re no longer an option. To make things work, I need to operate within those parameters.

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Sometimes, I feel like I need to be up to date with everything happening on social media—the algorithm changes, the new policies, the latest blunders.

But none of that helps you write a better newsletter or figure out how to get new subscribers, so here are some ideas I’ve been batting around this week.

1. Be yourself, be consistent, and you’ll find your people. You don’t need to become better or more marketable – you need to be exactly who you are so that people on the same operational frequency can find you. Like Mehret Biruk wrote, “when you put on a mask, you attract the wrong kind of people because they are attracted to the mask and not the you behind the mask.”
2. Do it how you want. You don’t need to start a podcast. You don’t need to make videos. You don’t need to sign up for the hot new app. Like David Speed wrote recently in ‘I’m Saying BYE to 100K Instagram Followers,’ “are we going to keep compromising ourselves to cater for an ever-decreasing attention span?”
3. Go back to what worked. Okay, social media aside, what else worked? Nic Peterson asks, “can you do it again, remove the parts you didn’t like and double down on the parts you did?” Get away from always having to do the hot new thing, and refine your previous efforts (h/t to Scott Perry).
4. Get with people. You can do this virtually or like Jaime Derringer (who founded Design Milk) says, “find an offline way to engage with your community through events, conferences, local meetups, and other non-social media engagements.” This moves beyond what we’ve been doing for so long – shouting our message on social media in hope that someone might hear it. It’s time to get more intentional.
5. Slow down. Step away from the online machine and watch what happens. Life goes on. We’re all busy, going about our lives. Post a dozen times a day on social media. Send an email three times a week. Make videos. Start a podcast. What does your art, your business, and your life look like if you slow it all down?

All of the above goes beyond open rates, ideal sending times, and promotions folders shenanigans.

This is about connection in its most basic form.

An email to an art gallery or booking agent, a phone call with an old co-worker, a video call with disgruntled creative folks looking for ways to exist without social media.

All things that the big corps can’t interfere with.

I wrote earlier this year, “Maybe centralized kingdoms of power and influence aren’t the answer.” Stop playing games you don’t want to play, befriend people doing the work you admire, and ascend to a whole new level beyond the social media rat race.

I’ve climbed over 17,000’ since April 19th. This is in preparation for a half-marathon that I’m running in 12 days.

What the hell does this have to do with the Social Media Escape Club?

It’s practice.

It’s why I’m not telling you to delete your social media accounts today.

If you want to live a life without social media stealing hours of your day, start by deleting the app(s) from your phone.

That’s practice (you can reinstall them later if needed).

Try logging out of the accounts on your computer.

Practice (I logged out of LinkedIn today).

Turn off your phone, as Cody Cook-Parrott writes about in ‘Hope and Flowers’:

I know that my ability to earn is directly related to my ability to rest. Not just rest but to turn off the phone, to communicate with less people, and have less screen time. To read, to write, to really be without the phone. To turn the phone off. How many times can I type – phone off. Phone off. No phone. The phone is off. When was the last time you turned your phone off?

NOTE: there’s no need to reply and tell me you can’t do so because you’re caring for someone or you’re waiting for an important call from your doctor—I get it.

Experience being unavailable.

How does it feel when no one can reach you? Maybe journal those feelings. Record some audio of your experience, or a video. You don’t need to share it, but come back to it in a week and reflect.

As you live your life away from social media an hour at a time, you’ll discover that things don’t usually crumble. You don’t disappear.

As you practice being away from social media, you might miss something, so adjust accordingly. If a friend usually DMs you, tell them you’re taking a break tomorrow, and you can be reached via email or text.

If they resist, focus on those who respect your decision not to use services that negatively impact your mental health (I’ve absolutely done this).

Some things you can do in an hour instead of using social media:

1. Go for a long walk, bike ride, or sit next to a lake
2. Share a meal with a friend
3. Read a book or a magazine
4. Send a nice email to someone whose work you admire
5. Call a friend and discuss art, movies, breakfast recipes, etc.
6. Contact someone in your field about working together on a project
7. Stare into space, the void, the darkness of time

One of my favorite things to do is take the photos, witty remarks, and hot takes that I used to post on social media and send them to a few friends instead or turn them into a blog post.

The spontaneous bits you’d post on social media can be the source material for your next newsletter, text to a pal, Discord group, or next live Zoom hangout with good people.

Like Professor Pizza of Axe Slasher said in one of our ESCAPE POD hangouts, “why should I give my best material to Twitter?”

Is it beyond comprehension that people at social media companies think of ways to make us dependent on their services? Could they actively be building a narrative that your participation is necessary?

First, consider the bait and switch: They got all of us to set up our profile pages for free and rewarded us with tons of views and likes. Eventually, we abandoned our websites, blogs, and email lists, and then they throttled our reach unless we paid to boost our posts or spent more time on their platform, uploading an un-ending stream of “content.”

Second, even if you don’t use their platforms to promote anything, you likely fell for the DM functionality to keep in touch with friends and family. But what if you get locked out of your account? What if your friend gets their account suspended for some random reason? What happens when one of your parents gets scammed and can’t log in?

If you lose touch with people you care about, you’ll figure out how to reestablish the connection quickly, usually by phone, text, or email—three pre-installed apps on every smartphone.

Remember – many people are paid well to keep you locked into their ecosystem. Escaping the world of social media ain’t easy, but that’s what Social Media Escape Club is here for.

I ran 1,105 miles in 2020, which took me around 200 hours.

Scrolling 33 minutes daily on your phone adds up to about 200 hours a year, too.

A friend told me recently that they want to start a newsletter, but they don’t want it to become a large time investment.

I told them that their next newsletter “is already written.”

Re-purposing the content you’ve already posted (on social media) means less time thinking about your next email newsletter, and gives you a jump on the creative process.

Once you have everything copied and pasted into your newsletter, you can make expand on some of your ideas, or include some other photos that you didn’t share on socials.

Most of us thought nothing of posting daily to social media, sometimes multiple times per day or per hour when an awards show was on or during a major sporting event.

Most of us have years of archival material to draw from, all tucked away in our social media channels.

Your posts only reach a fraction of your followers. Probably 90% of them never saw any of this material in the first place, so don’t feel bad about re-using your own material – it’s your material!

What could you do with just 30 minutes per day that might benefit you a year from now?

• Learn how to make scenic videos of lakes using a digital camera, Zoom H6 audio recorder, and editing the whole thing in DaVinci Resolve.
• Learning a new technique related to your craft
• Journaling and meditating
• Going for a walk, a bike ride, or go scootering (thanks, Amy Walsh)
• Dancing to your favorite records (R.I.P. mom)
• We think nothing of spending an hour a day on work meetings – what if we spent 30 minutes a day on FRIEND MEETINGS?
• Start a daily 30-minute check-in video call to help everyone stay on track and encourage one another

Sometimes, these things sound like too much, but each day, we have choices: invest in ourselves or create shareholder value for corporate behemoths.

Consider that we don’t think twice about uploading our original photos and text to a platform that sells advertising around our unpaid labor while limiting the number of our friends (or potential clients) who will ever see it, thus incentivizing us to either spend more of our time (a finite resource) on the platform “engaging,” or spending actual money to “boost” our posts so more people might see it.

There are three places to start when writing a newsletter.

1. Sharing

A link you shared with a friend can be your next newsletter. It might be topical, about a recent event or a new idea.

You could also dig through the archives on your blog or newsletter or your social media profile and re-share links that meant something a year ago or 10 years ago, like this blog post I wrote a decade ago:

“Every one to one interaction is priceless. It’s valuable. It can’t be outsourced, and you can’t just get some unpaid college intern to do it.”

Remember – something you shared 18 months ago was probably seen by just 8% of your followers – and you’ve probably gained more subscribers over the last year and a half!

2. Storytelling

We’ve all got stories, some big, some small.

I was taking some photos around town a few days ago, and the owner of the barbershop yelled, “come take our photo!”

Now, that doesn’t happen very often, but it made for a fun story!

Here’s some other stories I haven’t told yet:

• That time I invited by highschool buddy to NYC to hangout when I had the Deftones come to our studio for an interview.
• How I ditched all my belongings in 2010 and left Brooklyn with my bike and my laptop and rode to Rutherford, NJ to start my nomadic bike nerd journey and ended up in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
• When a manager for a big Grammy Nominated band told me they had a problem with my interviewer minutes before we were supposed to go live on a podcast.

You’ve probably got stories, and your subscribers would probably love to hear them.

3. Showing

This is the default, the starting point, the simplest thing to write about in your newsletter, but you have to do it in a way that feels right.

In last week’s ‘Social Media Support for Artists’ (hosted by the wonderful Beth Spencer), someone spoke about taking photos of her sketchbooks and then dreading the idea of posting them to social media and writing captions for each.

Someone suggested, “Make it a video!” And for this person, that resonated.

If you dread doing something, you’re probably not gonna do it. And if you do it reluctantly, everyone is gonna know you’re being pissy about it. The vibes will be off, my friend.

Here are two examples of sharing and keeping the good vibes:

• Noah Kalina sent a newsletter about making egg cups, which was a story from a magazine that had come out several months prior.
• Taylor Pendleton made a video of her walking around Death Valley taking pictures. No music. No dialogue.

Do I dread running? Well, I love eating pizza a lot more, that’s for sure.

But I do love being outside. So running gets me outside, into the space I love. And then I love sharing photos and videos from being outside, way more than making “infographics” or whatever to try to promote my work.

By sharing a glimpse of what I love, it shows a bit of who I am, and maybe that resonates with a few people.

Getting off social media has to be more than just “yeah, but how will I still sell stuff?” It’s about the time you regain, which allows you to explore, learn, and grow.

So don’t get sad about writing a newsletter, thinking you’ve got nothing to write to your subscribers—you’ve got plenty to write about, share, and explore with the people who’ve signed up and said, “Yes, I want more of what you have.”

You are more interesting than storage lockers, and that show has been on air longer than Seinfeld.