I deleted my artist social accounts for a month and nobody noticed, which told me something
I turned off my Instagram and the other one for all of January. Just to see. Had 2,400 followers, which I'd been half-maintaining for years out of some sense that I had to.
Nobody noticed. Not one message. My Etsy orders didn't change. The gallery that carries my work emailed about something else entirely.
Two things came out of it. One, I'm not going back to posting three times a week for an audience that wasn't there. Two, it cost me nothing, and that's both freeing and a bit humbling. The people who actually buy my work found me through the gallery, through word of mouth, through a craft fair in November. Not through my hashtags.
I'm not saying online doesn't work. It clearly does for plenty of people. But I'd built my whole week around a platform that didn't care whether I was on it or not. That's a strange thing to have done for a decade.
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This really resonates. I've had the same knot in my stomach about social media for years, always posting out of obligation more than anything. But I've never had the guts to actually pull the plug and test it, so I kind of admire that you did.
Your point about the gallery is the thing that sticks with me. I sell a few pieces at local fairs and that's about it, and every time I think about quitting the posting grind I get scared I'll lose the little bit of visibility I have. But you're right, the people who actually buy tend to come through the paths that are already working. The followers feel like a scoreboard, not customers.
Did the month off change anything about how you think about posting now that February's here, or are you still deciding what that looks like? I'm genuinely curious because I keep going back and forth on it myself.
The obligation-posting is its own quiet weight, isn't it. I've never fully deleted mine, but I let it go dormant for months at a time and I know exactly what you mean about that fear of losing the little visibility. Yet the pieces that actually sell, the ones that find homes, almost never come from the feed. They come from someone seeing the work in person, standing in front of it long enough to feel something.
I don't think the posting is what holds the door open. I think the work does. The rest is just noise we make to convince ourselves we're doing something.
That's exactly it. Standing in front of it. Nobody makes a decision about a piece from a feed, they look at it for three seconds and scroll on. The work doesn't survive that. It survives someone holding the paper, seeing the edge.
I don't think I even realized I'd been posting to convince myself until I stopped and felt how much lighter January was. Not the visibility I lost. The noise I didn't have to make.
The knot is real, I had it for years. And honestly the only reason I finally did it was that I got tired enough of my own obligation-post feeling to just see what happened. The fear that it would all disappear was bigger than any evidence I actually had.
Fair stalls are a different thing though, that's real face to face contact. People remember you when they can hold the work. I'd guess that's worth more than the feed anyway. Have you tried just cutting back to once a week for a month and watching if anything at all shifts? That was the half-step I never took, and I wish I had. The full month off taught me more, but it was a bigger jump than it needed to be.