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I've noticed a trend lately, or maybe I'm just noticing it now. It feels like the harder we try to engineer 'engagement,' the more people tune out. I spent last week looking at some analytics for a project, trying to get a spike in likes or shares on a particular piece of content. We tweaked the hook, adjusted the CTA, even played with the posting time. Nothing moved the needle much. Then, coincidentally, I posted a photo of my messy studio floor, paint tubes everywhere, a half-finished canvas in the background, with a caption just saying 'Work in progress.' It got more genuine interaction – people asking about the paint, the process – than the polished piece we'd spent days on. It makes you wonder if the 'performance' is the problem, not the content itself. C'est ça, non?

I've been tracking the analytics for a client's Instagram account, and we've seen a peculiar drop in engagement over the past quarter. Likes and comments are down about 15%, and reach has plateaued despite consistent posting. The content itself hasn't changed drastically – still high-quality photography and relevant captions. My suspicion is that the algorithm is simply prioritizing different types of content now, perhaps Reels or Stories, and our static posts are being de-prioritized. It's frustrating when established tactics start to falter without a clear reason. Has anyone else observed a similar shift recently?

For about a year I did the thing everyone says, post the process, tag Lyon, show the easel in the corner of the studio, all that. And it worked, in the sense that the little heart counter went up. Then I realised I was making a kind of content about painting instead of just finishing the painting. So I stopped. I post the work now, dry, no process, no "here's my messy palette." Engagement dropped like a stone. And I don't care because I'm not performing a painter anymore, I'm just painting. The people who actually buy from me found me anyway, through the work itself or through a collector who passed my name along. The rest were just watching. I know the algorithm people will say I'm throwing away exposure. Maybe. But exposure to people who want a show instead of a painting, what is that worth exactly.

I spent years putting only the final work online. Perfect lighting, good photo, the painting resolved. Crickets, mostly. A few likes from other painters. A few months ago I was frustrated with a figure painting, the hand was wrong for the fourth time, the whole thing looked a mess, and I took a photo of it on the easel with my palette旁边, just to vent to a painter friend. I put it on Instagram almost without thinking. That post got more comments than anything I'd put up in six months. People like to see the struggle. They like to see that you also don't know what you're doing for a while. I think for a long time I thought showing process would somehow diminish the finished work, like revealing the trick. But most people aren't painters. They have no idea what goes into it, and watching something get ugly and then get pulled back out of the ugly, that's the part they actually want to see. I'm still not comfortable with it. I was trained to show only the resolved thing. But I can't argue with the numbers, and more to the point I can't argue with the fact that the conversations are better. People ask real questions instead of just saying "beautiful." Wondering if anyone else has found that the unfinished, uncertain thing gets more traction than the polished final version.

A consultant they hired said my feed lacked "curatorial coherence." Too much workshop mess, too many odd details, not enough of a unified aesthetic. So I posted a photo of a pigeon I found in my studio courtyard. Dead. Beautiful grey feathers, one wing slightly open, eye still clear. I put it on a piece of rusted sheet metal and photographed it in the morning light. Caption: "Studio assistant quit." It got more engagement than anything I'd posted in six months. The gallery was not amused. But two collectors messaged me asking if it was available as a print. I don't know what the moral is. Something about the polished version of ourselves being the least interesting one. Or that dead birds sell. One of those.

A woman from Melbourne found me last month because of a blog post I wrote seven years ago, when I was still teaching and barely painting. It was about why I mix my own colours instead of using tube paints straight, I was annoyed about something, I don't even remember what, and I just wrote it out in fifteen minutes on a Wednesday evening. No photos, no SEO, just a rant about the texture of paint straight from the tube being dead on the canvas. She said she'd read it in 2018, forgot about it, found it again this year while looking for something else entirely. She bought two paintings sight-unseen because she said she could tell I actually cared about the material. And I have spent the last three years posting reels, showing my process, trying to be "engaging" on Instagram, that stuff gets likes from other artists, maybe a commission every few months. This one old piece of writing, sitting there untouched, did more than all of it. I don't know what the lesson is exactly. Keep the old things alive, maybe. Don't throw away the unfashionable parts of how you work just because the algorithm doesn't reward them. Or maybe it's that a real opinion outlasts a good strategy every time.

There's a Saturday market in Galway I've been doing on and off for maybe twelve years. Rain, hail, the odd glorious day where everyone's in great form. And I used to think the point of it was to shift prints, which it is, but the real thing it taught me is how to talk to people about what you make without sounding like you're selling. You get all sorts at a stall. The tourist who wants something that says Ireland without being a leprechaun on a toilet. The local who stops because they recognise the pier or the mountain. The person who clearly loves the work but hasn't got thirty quid and stands there turning a card over in their hands. And you learn, quick, that the ones who buy aren't the ones you try to convince. They're the ones you just talk to, normally, about the carving or the ink or the hare that lives in the field behind your house and won't let you get near it. The thing that stuck with me is this: I've never sold a print by telling someone how good it is. I've sold plenty by telling them the story of the night I carved it and nearly took the tip of my finger off, or how the block got dropped in a puddle and the crack became part of the print. People want the thing behind the thing. They don't want a pitch. Anyway. The market's grand for that. But online, I still catch myself trying to sound like a proper business instead of just a fella in a jumper with ink under his nails. And the minute I do that, engagement drops off a cliff. The posts that work are always the ones where I forget I'm supposed to be marketing and just talk about what happened today. Sure I don't know where I'm going with this except that the best marketing advice I ever got was from a woman buying a print of a heron who said "just tell me why you made it" and walked away with two.

I've been spending so much time on short-form video lately, mainly Reels for Instagram. But I see so many people having huge success on YouTube Shorts and I'm wondering if I should pivot? It feels like a totally different beast. The content that does okay on Reels feels too polished for Shorts sometimes, if that makes sense? Has anyone found a good strategy for both, or do you focus on one platform? My engagement is okay on Reels, but nothing like what I see some people getting on Shorts. Maybe I'm just looking at the wrong creators. It's hard to tell what's real and what's just a lucky spike.

I had a big print deadline, 40 editions for a group show in Milan, and I just stopped posting. No stories, no carousels, no polite little "in the studio" clips. Nothing for almost nine weeks. I was sure my engagement would be dead when I came back. Instead I gained followers. Not a lot, but more than I did in the three months before where I was posting twice a week. And the people who messaged me were actual humans I've met or worked with, not the usual ghost likes. I don't know what to make of this. Maybe the algorithm prefers scarcity. Or maybe when you're not performing, the only people who show up are the ones who actually care about the work. Which is a nicer thought but also harder to monetise, so I'm not sure it's useful. Anyone else had the experience of doing less and getting more?

She told me my photos were too dark. That the lighting was "giving dungeon." She wanted me to show my face more, film myself working, add trending audio. I sat there in the meeting and I thought, I'm 58 years old. I build environments from scrap metal and broken furniture. I am not a content creator. I am not a brand. I am a person who makes things in a studio that looks like a bomb went off in a scrapyard. But the thing is she wasn't wrong about the engagement numbers. They're flat. They've been flat. And I don't know what to do with that information because I refuse to make the kind of content that would fix it. So I'm stuck in this weird space where I understand the game and I also refuse to play it. Anyone else just quietly accepting obscurity because the alternative looks unbearable?

I used to write these careful captions about cyanotype chemistry, the UV exposure times, the pH of the seawater I develop in. Thought people needed to understand the craft to appreciate the print. Then I posted a photo of a print that went completely wrong, overexposed, paper curled, the blue almost black, the seaweed I'd placed shifting mid-exposure so the whole thing was a ghost. I wrote "The sun moved and so did I. This one belongs to the Atlantic now." It got more engagement than any of my tidy process posts. People commented about their own ruined things, the work they'd abandoned, the projects that fell apart. A gallery owner in Amsterdam messaged me asking if I had more "failures" available. I don't think people want to understand how it's made. I think they want to feel that they're allowed to make mistakes too. So now I show the ones that didn't work, alongside the ones that did. The studio floor after a bad week. The prints I fished out of the tide at the wrong moment. The work sells the same. But the conversations are different.

ok so I spent like a month earlier this year obsessing over my instagram grid, scheduling posts, planning reels, the whole thing. had a notion doc and everything. and you know what happened? nothing. flat engagement, same followers, maybe one sale from it. then I had this week where I just said fuck it and made 40 tiny test tiles, different clay bodies, glazes I mixed myself, firing temps I'd never tried. just messing around, no end goal. I posted them ugly, in progress, some failed. just the real process, no polish. those posts outperformed everything I "planned" by a lot. like triple the saves, actual comments from other potters, and two commissions from people who saw the test tiles and wanted something in that glaze. I think the audience can smell when you're performing vs when you're actually doing the work. the planning was me trying to look like a serious business. the test tiles were me being a ceramicist. anyone else find that the stuff you don't overthink just lands better?

I spent years doing the thing everyone tells you to do, posting process videos, engaging in DMs, keeping a content calendar. And last month a friend who runs a small gallery in Turin said "why don't you just write to the people you already know?" So I wrote a very plain email. No newsletter platform, no template. Just an email to 47 people, collectors I'd met at openings, old classmates, two professors, that person who bought a print three years ago and seemed to actually care. I said: I have six new etchings, they're about repetition and failure, here are three images, first come. I sold five prints in two days. Five prints to people I already knew. I spent maybe an hour on the email. I had spent three months on Instagram for the same result, maybe less. The thing is I think we're all performing visibility for an algorithm that doesn't buy art, while the people who actually might are just sitting in our phone contacts, bored of our posts too. I'm not saying burn the platform down. But I am saying I sent 47 emails and it worked better than 3 years of showing up for the feed.

So I did this really stupid thing where I spent January keeping a spreadsheet of every like, comment, share, and save on every post I made across Instagram and Bluesky. I thought I'd find a pattern, you know? Something to reverse engineer. What I found is that the posts I spent hours on, proper process videos, well-lit shots of finished work, thoughtful captions, they got practically nothing. Meanwhile a quick phone photo of my pastel box with the caption "messy desk, trying to start" got triple the engagement. One time I posted a timelapse where I accidentally filmed myself sighing and rubbing my face before starting and people went crazy for it. I don't know what to do with this information. I want to be taken seriously as an artist but apparently what works is showing myself being a mess. Is the answer really just... performative struggle? Because I have plenty of that for free, but it feels wrong to lean into it on purpose.

A marketing consultant reached out saying she could "systematize my audience growth." I told her I don't have an audience, I have maybe 400 people who care about industrial salvage installations in Prague. She said that's exactly the problem. So for a month I let her try. She had me post on a schedule, use certain words, track when people engaged most. I did it. Numbers went up slightly. Total new people who actually came to a studio visit or wrote something that showed they understood what I'm doing: zero. The thing is my work takes six weeks to build and you walk through it in ten minutes. You can't optimize that. You can't gamify someone standing in a room full of old factory parts and feeling something. I told her I think the disconnect was that my work is slow and her job is to make things fast. She said I was being resistant. She wasn't wrong. But neither was I. I don't know what the proper social media strategy is for work that takes months and asks for patience. Maybe there isn't one. Maybe the answer is just keep making the rooms and the people who need to find them eventually will.

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.

i spent like three years trying to do instagram right. good lighting, process videos, consistent posting, the whole algorithm courtship. and it got me... some likes from other artists. nice, but nobody buying. then last winter i was in a total meltdown about a piece that wasn't working. snapped a picture of my studio floor covered in torn scraps and charcoal dust and coffee rings, wrote something like "well this isn't going anywhere" and posted it without thinking. that one post got more replies than anything i'd done that year. two people commissioned work from it. so now i just send the ugly stuff. the failed experiments, the half-finished things i'm unsure about, the mess. i think people want to see the struggle, not the finished product. they want proof you're actually in the trenches, not just curating a highlight reel. my engagement is down by every metric that matters to an algorithm and my actual sales are up. make it make sense.

I’ve been tracking conversion rates on a few of our direct-response campaigns this quarter, primarily for some of our more technical botanical print offerings. The numbers are… not what they were. It used to be that a clear, benefit-driven headline and a strong call to action would yield a predictable lift in click-throughs. Now, it feels like the algorithm is actively suppressing that kind of hard-sell approach. We’re seeing better engagement, ironically, on posts that are more narrative or educational, even if they don't immediately scream ‘buy now.’ It’s a shift that requires a significant recalibration of our approach, moving from immediate persuasion to a slower burn of building authority and trust. Frankly, it’s exhausting to adapt to such constant flux. Has anyone else noticed this move away from direct-response efficacy on platforms like Facebook or Instagram?

just spent three hours down a rabbit hole figuring out why one specific reel absolutely tanked after three days of killer engagement. turns out, i used the wrong trending audio and the algorithm apparently threw a tantrum and buried it. lol. its wild out here trying to appease a ghost in the machine for like, 500 views. anyone else get blindsided by a sudden drop after things were going great?

I've been with the same gallery since 2009. They sold my work. They took their cut. We didn't talk about it much. It worked. Got an email last week from their new director. Young guy. Said they're shifting focus to artists with "stronger direct engagement." Which means they want me to do their job for them online. I got a 400-pound granite piece in my studio right now that nobody's seen. I'm trying to figure out if I should drag it out and film myself grinding on it, or just keep working and see what happens. Neither option feels right. Anyone else getting this from their gallery lately? The "we love your work but also can you become a content creator" talk?