Self expression or business?
It is a fact that many people thought in the beginning, by sharing their art and ideas on social media, they will become successful entrepreneurs by gaining huge numbers of followers and they will be living by selling their art.
In the past 6 years I have spent enormous time on social media, business wise and private wise too. On Facebook I have shared normally family related moments, excursions, activities done together with my friends and loved ones, I was handling some business pages.
After a while I felt I would need another forum for my self expression and in 2016 Instagram came in perspective, which forum I have used as a blog forum. Shared some nature photos and my professional pictures and was looking for some amazing nature photographers and bloggers.
In 2016 Instagram had a different system, people could reach out to other people via sharing their content based on using hashtags and create around themselves in the beginning huge audience in an organic way easily.
The difficulty with these things are, that they can sometimes be the trap and the enemy of us, if we don’t learn to use them smartly. All the human attitudes are appearing here in the same way, like in real life. People, who didn’t get enough attention and feedback in real life, tried to gain some on Instagram. I don’t want to go into such details, like people showing totally something else here, than they are, the pitfalls of these things, just to try to highlight some facts, which might help others to handle it smarter than I or some other people did.
When we use social media, especially Instagram as a tool in order to introduce our hobby or art….after a while we reach a level of followers, which requires from us a raised amount of attention and communication, that we need to sit down and check: aha, I have spent today so much time on this forum. Does it serve my way of living? Next to this did I spend enough time with my children, dog, husband, wife, boyfriend, girlfriend? Was I working hard to make these connections deeper? Or was I rather talking to my virtual friends by typing on my phone, stuck on the screen and not even understanding why I feel so tired and exhausted instead of feeling good?
Oh yes. I am 100% sure that these things above are well known for many of my Instagram friends. 🙂
In order to handle it smartly, try to set up in your mind the aim you are there for, the purpose you want to achieve and if it is not even close to supporting your future goals, get rid of it. You can not expand ergonomics and spend your day on it if this is not what makes you living off.
If you want to make business with it, next to keeping up your connections and making online networking you need to set up a unique communication strategy and find those tools or unique services via you become unique and can serve people with those in the way they need it. Set up advertisements in order to be visible. Don’t get pissed off, if you receive less and less likes. Instagram and Facebook have changed a lot and the algorithms have changed in the way you can reach by posting only 3-10% of your audience in an organic way. The following rules like: “comment active in the first half an hour you have shared your post” and “answer more detailed comments at least with 4-5 expressions, almost a sentence” are doing again what??? Making the slave of these tools. They require you to spend more time on it…So if you have better aims and goals than to be stuck on the screen and chit chat with strangers without any concrete purpose, go and do it. Smell some fresh air, meet your friends and invest energy in your real connections. 🙂
If you use these forums as a professional, create quality content – depending on the areas you work on and be sure, you use professional advertisement structure in order to reach your target audience instead of typing and chit chatting on your smart phone the whole day.
Wishing good luck to everyone! 🙂
Best Regards,
Unicorn