Category: Social MediaCategory: Social Media

From JA Westenberg’s “Communities are not fungible” piece,

“When a platform dies or degrades, its community does not simply migrate to the next platform, it fragments, and the ones who do arrive at the new place find that the social dynamics are different, the norms have shifted, and a substantial number of the people who made the old place feel like home are gone.”

This is what makes the “how do I move my social media followers to my newsletter?” a seemingly impossible task.

There are people that work at Meta who have multiple vacation homes because they are very good at their job, which is to keep users on their platform.

Make it addictive enough to keep people from leaving, and charge for things that used to be free, and you’ve got yourself a nice career.

Communities are not resources to be optimised and they’re not user bases to be migrated. They’re the accumulated residue of people choosing, over and over again, to remain in a relationship with each other under specific conditions that will never, ever recur in exactly the same way.

Some of your followers on Instagram are never going to subscribe to your newsletter.

Everyday, one of your followers logs into the platform for the last time.

Your followers are not yours, they are owned by the platforms who profit from your years of shouting “follow me on social media for updates!”

There are many ways to promote your work outside of social media. We promoted our work before the age of social media, and we’ll promote it long after those platforms are gone.

Who’s even on Twitter anymore?

Like, just a few short years ago it was practically law to be on Twitter, but now? Ew.

Same with Facebook.

These once mighty platforms are a laughing stock among the creative class.

“Post on the Facebook feed? AS IF!”

But nothing is black and white. If social media is working for you, and you have the bandwidth for it, great! Maybe you don’t need to be reading Social Media Escape Club, and that’s okay.

But if you’re tired, exhausted, burned out, if your mental health is affected by spending too much time on social media, it’s okay to make an exit!

You can have a career without social media! You can make art without posting!

Like Jes Raymond, who had an upcoming show to promote. Instead of posting about it on social media, she sent one email to a local paper and called a radio station.

“This past weekend, we had a little show up in a tiny town—St. Johnsbury. One of those places with a small newspaper. And I just decided that instead of making a bunch of social media posts about the show—especially to a town I don’t know—I’d do the human work.

I figured out who the journalist was at the local paper who writes the arts column. I wrote to them directly and sent them a press release. Then I found the local radio station—Vermont Public—and called them. I got our event on their calendar.

We ended up having about 150 people show up at this little church in a town I’d never played before.”

Is it easy? Nothing is easy! But its a big internet, it’s a big WORLD (not everyone is on Twitter! Or IG!), and I believe you can make a lot of things happen without ever posting on a social media platform again.

According to Ken Klippenstein, “the government is building a sociological profile of political discontent.”

Homeland security field agents are scouring the social media site Reddit, monitoring the communications of law-abiding Americans critical of the agency.

And if they’re scouring sites like Reddit, you know damn well they’re scouring Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and everywhere else.

Raziq Rauf from Running Sucks wrote about how some running clubs are choosing to not post about their events on social media because they don’t want to tip off ICE.

“I learned about all these run clubs from Instagram, but we’re doing a new thing where if you wanna get with South Central Run Club, you have to be in our Signal chat. South Central deals with hyper-policing. Most of our runners are Black and brown and you never know when ICE is gonna pull up. Instead of broadcasting our runs and making us vulnerable to surveillance, we stopped putting it on Instagram to make people feel safer to come and hang out.“

Exercising our legal right to free speech and protest (or just run with our friends) is hard without some of these digital tools, especially when those tools are owned by the very forces we oppose, but as Priya Parker says, “connection is the antidote to fascism.”

You think if you leave social media you’ll lose community and clients, right?

Well, what happens if you get locked out of your account? Or the platform shuts down?

You’d definitely lose all your community and clients then, right?!

So are you really comfortable leaving all of those people in the hands of the techbro industrial complex?

What’s the preventative action you could take today to ensure you can reach your people?

Consider that most of your potential clients are in their inbox all day.
And you could email those potential clients while everyone else is making dance videos or writing 1000 word “thought leader” posts on LinkedIn.

Perhaps the question isn’t “what if I lose people by leaving social media?”
The question becomes, “how can I future-proof my community and clients WITHOUT social media?”

What could this future-proofing strategy look like for you?

This from River Selby:

Whenever we log on to a social media platform, we risk our autonomy, our agency as human beings. Everyone, myself included, wants to think that they are resistant to the negative aspects of social media: advertising, algorithmic persuasion, etc. But we aren’t. The more time we spend on these platforms, the more vulnerable we are to persuasion.

The goal of every platform is to keep you on the platform, nothing else. The time you spend on their site or app, it builds value for their shareholders, and you hand over data by the truckload with every click, swipe, and like.

Read the rest of “The Resistance Will Not Happen On Instagram (or Facebook or TikTok)” here.