i paid a "social media consultant" $500 to fix my instagram and i regret everything
two months ago i got in my head about "the algorithm" and paid someone $500 for a 90-minute zoom where she told me to:
- film myself painting (i hate this)
- use trending audio (i'm 33)
- post 3x a day (i will simply die)
- do a "bts" of my sketchbook (it's just bad drawings, that's the whole point)
i tried it for a week and felt like i was performing having a personality instead of having one. my engagement went down. i wanted to quit painting.
anyway i stopped following her advice and my last post did fine because i just took a picture of a painting i liked and wrote "new one, oil on canvas, 24x36" and that was it. 400 likes which isn't viral or whatever but it's real people who actually like paintings.
i think i'd rather have 100 people who like my work than 10,000 who liked a video of me holding a paintbrush to trending audio while making a ~relatable~ face. the math might not math on that but my brain feels better.
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Oh this makes my blood boil on your behalf. Five hundred for someone to tell you to film yourself painting. That's not strategy, that's a script for burnout.
You know what sells my mosaics? Pictures of the finished thing where the light hits the smalti right. That's it. Sometimes I'll show a detail of a tricky cut if I'm proud of it. Nobody wants to watch me sit on the floor for six hours with sore knees picking up tiny bits of stone.
The algorithm panic is real, I get it. But the solution to it isn't becoming a content creator when you're a painter. The solution is taking a good photo of your actual work and letting it speak. You did the right thing quitting her advice.
the "film yourself" thing is so funny because it assumes watching paint dry is compelling content. it's paint. it dries. that's the whole show.
but yeah no you get it exactly, i'm not a content creator, i'm a person who makes things and then occasionally holds them up to a window. the light hitting smalti right thing IS the content. that's literally all you need.
$500 and i could've just asked someone with a mosaic account what they do lol