Category: Social MediaCategory: Social Media

LET YOUR SUBJECT SELL THE POST FOR YOU

If you interview BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN, his quote leads everything. That’s my rule.

We don’t need anyone to tell us that he “talks about writing” blah blah blah, so get out of the way and let his words lead the way.

LET YOUR POST SELL YOUR WORK FOR YOU
Stop explaining what you wrote and let the thing you wrote do the marketing.

GET TO THE POINT

You don’t need to explain the details. Nobody cares.

Do what Gabbie does, tell us what the post is about in the first few words, and get out of the way.

STOP APOLOGIZING

Blake and I had a pleasant exchange after this recent Note, but I included it because I want everyone to stop apologizing.

You can post a video, skip posting for a week or a month, you can do whatever you want, but please, you don’t need to apologize.

EMBED YOUR MEDIA

If you ask 100 people to click a link, you’re very lucky if 5% click, so put the thing RIGHT WHERE YOU ARE TALKING ABOUT THE THING.

PEOPLE BUY BOOKS BECAUSE OF WHAT’S INSIDE THE BOOKS

A book cover and a pre-order link are boring.

People take screenshots of chunks of text, bits of dialogue, illustrations, and photographs from books…

Until you’re big enough for everyone to be excited about your new book, your biggest job is to make sure everyone knows what’s in the book.

At the end of the day, you compete with other writers and outlets posting the same wishy-washy “marketing,” where everyone is trying to sell a 12-pack of soda at the store.

But Coca-Cola is selling flavored sugar water, the most boring shit on the planet, and they make commercials like the one below to get the word out.

You don’t make boring art, do you? You’re work is more exciting than soda, right?!

That’s why the magic can’t stop when the piece is done, or the song is mastered, or the photo is printed.

It’s fucking time to apply the same creative magic in telling the world about your work.

Today is a great day to delete a social media app from your phone.

Just one.

You can always re-install it. But maybe today delete it. Live without it for half a day. Catch yourself reaching for it, and when you do, be gentle with yourself.

Start thinking of the times you get on the apps. While watching TV? Warming up food? In the break room?

Think of things you can do in those times and spaces instead:

• Maybe do some yoga while streaming your favorite shows.
• Do some stretches while making coffee.
• Have a book of crossword puzzles on hand.
• Practice the piano.

We can’t just delete the apps and magically be delivered from their pull. We’ve gotta be deliberate in how we extract ourselves.

Look at how JustSomeMustard has replaced Instagram with learning another language. Spending just five or 10 or 30 minutes per day on positive learning can make a huge impact over weeks and months.

We can’t be our best selves if we’re drinking chaos and drama from the firehose of social media whenever we’re bored.

When do we write lyrics? Reach out to that old friend? When do we just let ourselves be bored for a minute or 10 on the bus ride to work and day dream like we did when we were kids?

If all our downtime is consumed with arching our necks into uncomfortable positions for too many hours per day, then what becomes of our art practice or the number of books we read per year?

We can watch 100 videos about marketing our work, but first, we have to set down our phones and then do that work. Talk to other people doing similar work, see the results, and adjust accordingly.

We can’t do that if we’re watching 3.6 hours of videos per day, all at just 15 seconds per clip.

Zuckerberg and Musk would love for you to spend a few more hours with them today, but I think it’d be better if you deleted one of the social media apps from your phone today.

Once you do that, you can start doing the things you know you should be doing.

Buy the plane ticket, get your busker license, take that meeting, get on that Zoom call with total strangers.

“Tension is the feeling we experience just before we grow.

Ironically, it’s what we seek, at the very same time we avoid it.” Seth Godin

Uploading a song to the internet is easy. Zero tension.
Premiering your work “inside the dome of the Oskar-Lühning Telescope” is hard.

That’s what makes the easy stuff so alluring, as no one can judge you, or point and laugh if it doesn’t work out.

You can stay busy making Reels, but that’s another form of playing it safe, as hardly anyone will see them, let alone judge you for it.

Zero tension.

Instead, try writing an email to the five (or 50) people who open all your emails, or people who’ve bought from you in the past.

You could make a podcast and post it everywhere and reach practically no one, or you could make it for a small group of subscribers.

This creates tension because when you make a podcast for just a few people, it’s likely a few of them react in a meaningful way.

Changing the name of your project creates tension – will it confuse people? Will people forget about me? But you do the hard thing because it feels right in your bones.

There’s no tension with a product shot and a “buy now” button.

But you can create tension by documenting the process of making a great photograph and offer a limited edition print to your YouTube audience.

If I remember correcty this video only had 350 views by the time the prints were sold out.

So make that call, sign up for that marathon, email a venue and plan an actual event, with real people, in real life.

All of this hard work is less of a dopamine rush than playing the social media viral popularity game, but there’s tension, and it’s totally what you need.

Is it FOMO (fear of missing out) when you’re not seeing 90% of the posts you signed up to see?

Is FOMO a thing when your fans don’t see 90% of what you post?

Missing out? We’re missing nearly everything – even when we spend multiple hours a day on these social media platforms.

How many more reels are we going to make?

How many announcements are we going to make to crickets?

Where is going through the motions getting us?

It’s time to build stronger connections without relying on social media, and here are a few ways you can do that:

• Get your friends’ phone numbers and emails and message them directly. Call your friends. Send them a video message. Remember, we’re not really built to follow the lives of 3242 people every moment of every day.
• Get your fans onto an email list, and occasionally send them a good newsletter.
• Set up a website and keep it current so friends (or potential clients) can look you up and see what you’re doing.
• Send out postcards (Miranda Lambert sent out postcards this summer).
• Got SMS data? Get good on that channel because most folks are bad at it!
• Get in front of people, IRL. Become unforgettable with your work, play your music on the street, show up in wild places!
• Make flyers for your next event and hand them to people. Include other people’s events, too. Become a trusted source of information for your community. Do this for mutual aid, short stories, or album pull lists.
• Email people you’ve worked with in the past to catch up.

These ideas require more effort than simply “posting,” but it won’t get any easier to reach your fans on social media in 2025, so what are ya gonna do?

Mark Zuckerberg is the second richest person in the world and doesn’t give a fuck about your pre-order or community event.

(Thanks Kyle Raymond Fitzpatrick for that link).

If you’re not working on untangling from social media, you’re putting your career into the hands of platform owners who only seek profit for themselves at your expense.

I got a few questions from CansaFis Foote via Substack Notes, and figured I’d share my answers with everyone. Enjoy.

Q. What made you choose this platform above all others?

Honestly, I started all of this using Circle, under the name HEAVY METAL EMAIL.

I wanted an online space for musicians to come together and talk about reaching their fans with an old-fashioned email newsletter. This was back in mid-2021 or so. I Tweeted about this little project and got about 19 people to click and sign up.

But things felt off.

I wasn’t using a newsletter to talk about newsletters, so I started looking for at Ghost, Beehiv, and of course Substack.

I picked Substack because I didn’t want to mess with designs and themes and settings, I just wanted to import my subscriber list of 19 people and send them an email.

Oh, and it was free.

With any new platform, the “Is this tool for me?” phase can get cloudy with just a 30-day trial to determine whether it’s a proper fit.

But then Substack rolled out Recommendations, which led to 2,000 new subscribers (remember, I started with 19).

Substack rolled out Notes, which feels like the early Twitter days. That’s led to making friends, paid clients, and plenty of fun interactions. It feels like I’m not just shoveling my “content” into a social media platform and hoping for a click.

Substack has let you upload video for the last few years, embed audio, and set up paid subscriptions, all for just a 10% cut.

For me, Substack is the place to be right now, and it’s built around the concept of having an email list. Call it social media if you want, but my email list will serve me for the next several years, even if this place goes out of business.

Q. Are there any other web spaces you recommend for creators?

This question always leads me to its deeper meaning, which sounds something like, “Where are some good places I can set up where MORE PEOPLE can see my stuff?”

Being “a regular” at 10 different coffee shops in town takes a lot of time and energy, so I’m always wary of going on that journey.

I recommend focusing on one or two places at most, intentionally driving the interest and clicks back to a place (Substack or your website) where people who want to become bigger fans of your work can subscribe to an email list.

When you spend all your time on social media platforms, you’re building an audience you can’t reach.

The long game is building an email list to reach people who want to hear from you.

Q. Would you recommend Substack over a personal webpage or is this better?

Substack is a platform like any other, and it can disappear tomorrow (that’s a reminder to export your email list).

Right now (9/24/2024), I recommend setting up Substack to give people an easy way to subscribe to your email list and to read your work online.

That said, I will always recommend you set up a website/blog to have a running archive of your work, a space on the internet that is wholly yours, where you control the branding, the vibes, the images, the typeface – everything.

I have a blog I’ve been updating since 2018 (sethw.xyz), and I’ve been adding and archiving my work from all over the internet, which dates back to 2004.

Austin is also on Tumblr, too (thanks Sarah Shotts for the heads up). I haven’t seen a post that links back to his work, but as you can see, right below his name, he links back to his site with three links, and his Substack.

Final thoughts:

Don’t leave your fans and readers to bounce around between different platforms like a pinball machine.

Have a website, provide a way for people to sign up for a newsletter, and then send them a damn good newsletter on occasion, telling them about the cool things you’re doing.

Then we get back to work.