Oh, Social Media
If you spend any type of time on platforms that exist to both inspire and breaking news! the hell out of us, you’ve probably noticed lately that folks aren’t very happy with the changes around Instagram. Or not very happy about *something, anything, everything*. It’s a big and hard spot to continue navigating. For a small business or full-time content creator, it can be scary and unnerving.
I’ve been frustrated about it, too. You spend all this time in a familiar place of knowing how and what and when to post to keep your followers engaged, to increase traffic around your business and point blank: increase your sales. It has so far been a mostly free platform that folks can utilize to promote growth, their mission, make money, facilitate brand awareness and many other gifts it has given us.
But it’s changing, and we hate it. We hate it because we don’t want to spend anymore time than we do creating content like a bunch of machines. It is a heavy space and we are feeling a lack of control around what is shown to us and our followers. Engagement for gorgeous still images and beautiful writing is bottom of the barrel while short videos with majority lack of artistry are at the top. QUICK, FAST, HARD. Creating those little videos is a lot of work that we don’t want to add to our spilling over plates.
If you’re like me and remember when Facebook came out in the early 2000s, you’ll remember how up in arms college students were when they felt it was being stripped from them and into the hands of older folks who “hadn’t even been to college”!
You’ll remember also that every time Facebook changed a platform or the news feed or the way you like and dislike something, *someone* was up in arms about it.
We cannot stand change. It throws us off when we’re already thrown off in other areas of life and we just want one, just one! thing to stay familiar and easy.
The recent change has me solidifying my belief that most people don’t truly value others’ work and time. We don’t want to value people who make toothpaste tubes or takeout containers. We don’t value delivery drivers out in the weather, the people who wash our dishes after eating out or pick up the cigarette butts off the side of the road. We certainly don’t value content creators, the work that goes into it, the brain power and thoughtfulness, the utter skill. Why is that? It’s too hard for us to understand what is going on outside of our own bubbles, making it hard for us to value and care for each other.
Right now Instagram is asking us little old folks to do what corporations have entire teams for. Entire teams to create marketing plans, entire teams to handle even just one platform. People have full-time, six-figure jobs centered around content creation for the marketing of their corporate brands.
The little guys can’t keep up. And are severely undervalued for their free work. Most, myself included, scroll through feeds without a thought in the world for the energy it took for those quick videos to be published for the world to see. And it’s free. That doom scrolling, the searching for a laugh scrolling, the mindless so I don’t have to think about the other stuff scrolling — it’s FREE. But someone spent a whole lot fo time and energy on it, and they’ll do it again tomorrow.
We feel like we’re out of control on the change, like there is a big Instagram head in the sky controlling what we can and cannot do on platforms “OR ELSE”! We hate how tethered we are to the platform but recognize how difficult it will be to change over to an unfamiliar space that we have to navigate once again. We HAD this, you know — now we don’t. And to us creators, marketers, small business folks just trying to make do with what we have, we recognize that no one really values the work that we do behind the scenes.
BUT, we are not ACTUALLY out of control, here, though it seems so. This space is ours and so are the minutes in our days if we remember that they are. The content we want to see is ours to curate if we spend the time valuing even ourselves. The time we spend ingesting it is up to us to keep a handle on. It’s easy and free for us to open the apps and look at what they show us and move forward then throw the phone down wondering why the world is the way it is OR being inspired. But are we truly valuing each other’s content or are we just choosing the mindlessness?
It’s up to our followers and customers to support us in this transition, for sure, but we can’t fully rely on it. How do we navigate this YET AGAIN unprecedented change and move forward with a pivot? I’ve seen it and you probably have to: in this environment if you are unwilling to pivot from what you’ve always known, move with what the customer wants and still keep your values, and rearrange what is no longer working, your business won’t survive.
So what’s next other than staying up late at night figuring out how to slice and dice videos when that’s not actually a skillset we possess or want to learn? When it is the job of multiple people in big corporations to do that slicing and dicing AND they get insurance with their salary for doing it. What’s next when you obsess over how to navigate the change so much that all that really gets done is the manifestation of anger around not being able to navigate another change?
You just start doing whatever in the hell you want is what you do. You keep putting out what you want to put out, spending time on the things that matter to you, be willing to pivot within the reason of a healthy heart and mind, and just keep rolling on. After nearly 10 years of this content creation work, the only thing that has remained the same is that if you keep putting out what YOU and your business want to put out, the people you want in your spaces will keep on coming back.
Be authentic. Be genuine. Say it sucks. Piece together a shitty video here and there to appease the algorithm God’s and then put up your “I’m still in debt from my art education” still image that is a sweet little break from the grindy feed.
The reality is that Instagram doesn’t care about you. You are a blip, they are a machine. Your values are different than theirs and they always will be. The same goes for all media platforms that are so fixated on feeding you the news and content that makes you stay awake at night. We are still in control, though - don’t forget that. Be in control.
In summary: value the hard work of others when you have no understanding of it, pivot and do what you want in the pivot but be willing to pivot, and stay in control of your ingestion of media. We got this, y’all. Once again.
