Table of Contents
Foreward: Radioactive Socmed
I’ve found that it’s been helpful to think about social media like uranium.
It’s incredibly valuable and an immensely powerful tool, and it can do great good or great evil depending on how it’s used. It can serve you well if you handle it carefully and wear protective gear, but if you spend too much time touching it or being around it you will get cancer and it will destroy you from within.
But if you handle it with care and treat it with an almost clinical, scientific level of respect, you can accomplish great things and change how you live for the better.
[July 8 2024] EDITED TO ADD: ok so something really funny happened and I wanna put it here because it’s relevant.
Approximately two days after posting this, I went low-key insane and had to log out of social media for two weeks. The timing of this is hilarious but it also really hammers home every fucking thing i’ve said in this post. Even if you “do everything right” there’s still gonna be times where you just simply cannot handle it and need time to Log Off. The psychic damage a person can sustain from social media is super real, and even when actively trying to prevent that damage, you can still get got.
i just thought it was worth it to mention.
Please take all of my suggestions as only those: suggestions.
I’m not trying to tell you what to do, and I’m not trying to tell you that this is the only way to do this. I just want so badly to let you know that you don’t have to work so hard for so little. I’ve suffered so much over this and it’s taken years of practice and observation to do this without getting hurt. And I still get hurt. It’s just less often and not as bad nowadays. I want so badly for you to have more love for yourself and your art, and this is just me trying very hard to tell you that spending your days grinding on a socmed platform isn’t going to do that for you.
Despite this, a lot of us still need to work at this horrible wheel. And I don’t want to see more of us break on this wheel. I don’t know if any of this will be helpful, but I have a small corner of the void to scream into so that’s what I’m gonna do lol
Social Media Sucks.
This is a complete statement and tbh I dont think I know anyone who would argue.
One can speculate that social media was designed to make us miserable, but whether that was a deliberate orchestration or not we know that it totally fucks us up mentally. I think most people who run creative social media accounts, especially artists, find that it’s incredibly draining to simultaneously be one of the many vertebrae of the backbone supporting a hellsite and to be disrespected by the platform every goddamn step of the way.
If you make art, or videos or writing or whatever craft or that people have cruelly renamed as “content”, you are one of the people that keeps these social media platforms alive. “Content creators” are so valuable because without “content” there is no reason to go to spend our time on these websites. We go to [insert your hellsite of choice] to see new things, hear new music, learn about books you’d never heard of, see art that inspires you. I genuinely dont think we go there to watch Emerald Prince McShit and The Terf publicly fight about their equally shitty opinions. We go to these websites to see art and memes and stuff!
“C o n t e n t.”
Without hyperbole these platforms really are nothing without people like us, and yet we’re kind of on our own when it comes to managing them. We don’t get support, and it’s rare we ever get paid directly. But we do it because, if we’re trying to survive off of any of this, we have to.
Social media management is a legitimate paid full-time job for a reason, and I think sometimes artists forget that maintaining a solid socmed presence is literally working a second job. There’s a level of discouragement and exhaustion in our community that I see on a regular basis, and it’s really disheartening to know that this is becoming a universal feeling.
Managing this shit is hard. And tbh beyond the friendships made, it’s not particularly rewarding either. The amount of work we put in vs the funds we get out is uh
uhhh
yeah it’s not great, it doesn’t feel good.
But the fact remains that a healthy social media presence can lead to more reliable feedback, more reliable sales and commissions, and steadier increases in subscribers for paywall programs and streaming. So a lot of us HAVE to keep it moving!
But damn! It turns out that spending a significant part of your life on a website designed to make you feel shitty and steals your hard work and doesn’t pay you for any of it is really bad for your mental health! Trying to maintain this stuff and also not go completely insane is REALLY DIFFICULT.
Full honesty vulnerability time: Between 2021 and now (June 2024) I almost went completely insane for real, and a lot of it had to do with trying to manage this stuff. I had multiple mental breakdowns, very closely skirted hospitalization, had some pretty scary relapses, and honestly in some of the darker times I was ready to terminate my career and myself.
That was bad lol! That was bad, so let’s not do that.
Let’s do what we can to not make our massive stack of horrible worries heavier. Let’s make some more art! And let’s get some folks to see it!
Full disclaimer: I’m not an expert at this, and I’m all self-taught only through personal experience and observation. At this time I don’t have a massive following, and I’ve never gone viral or anything. But I have a following of really cool and supportive people, I have a better sense of myself and have better self-talk, and when I open for commissions I tend to sell all slots within a day or two.
I want this for you. These are nice things to have and it makes life a little easier to live. I don’t know if these methods will work for you and legit they might not. But I want to help if I can. It’s fucking bleak out there and I think we all deserve a chance to carve out our little place on the web without feeling sick.
So these are the things that I do to maintain a social media presence without losing my mind.
Prepare a backlog
Don’t post everything right away. Have stuff stashed that you can post for the next post day.
Don’t worry about having 10 finished pieces lying around. Having finished art ready to go is obviously great, but you can also post crops of WIPs and sketches and stuff.
Some stuff I can line up in my posting schedule/queue can be
- crops of WIPs. Don’t post a WIP of the entire piece. If you post a cropped WIP instead, you can get 3 or 4 crops from the same work at the same point of progress. Tbh it’s not very exciting to see the same image over and over with slight changes, and doing it too often can burn out your audience. But if you use a crop this can get people more excited to see the full thing!
- sketches! turns out folks love sketches. I work in a sketchbook on a regular basis, so sometimes when I’m in between larger projects I’ll post those.
- old pieces that i havent posted before or in a long time.
Having a backlog can keep you from burning out or falling out of your posting schedule.
Post regularly and consistently
You don’t have to post every day (it’s not a good idea tbh, and there are other ways to be active daily.)
Consistency is the key.
If you post on Wednesdays, post every Wednesday. If you post every two days, post every two days. If you post once a month, post once a month! Do whatever you want but be consistent about it and do your best to land on the same day in the same rhythm.
Humans are creatures of habit and we live in an unpredictable world, so reliability in any form is super attractive to your audience whether they are aware of it or not.
Repost your own posts, your own stuff.
Not only do you need to do this but it’s okay to do this! If you make a post, you can and should repost/reblog it. I have little routines for it, but you can do it however you like. I will go back maybe one or two weeks and repost an occasional piece, but I have seen some people that go back almost a year and do little sessions of self reposting.
This works great on BSKY for sure, but you absolutely must to do this to be found on Tumblr. I’ve seen people who treat Tumblr like twitter and then get discouraged when they don’t gain traction. Tumblr doesn’t have an algorithm, so you can’t just drop your piece and go. You must repost your own work because people WILL miss it.
For Tumblr I recommend queuing up a bunch of reblogs of your own work so that it’ll do reblogs throughout the day/week/whatever your schedule for it is.
On Bluesky I recommend doing one or two self reposts once or twice a day. Too much in a row and you saturate the feed and can burn out your audience. Too few, and you get lost.
I do not have suggestions for twitter except to leave twitter.
also another note on tumblr: you have to blog! You have to reblog posts, you have to keep your blog alive. Tumblr may have been one of the ships we jumped to (or back to) but it isnt a twitter alternative, it’s a blogging site. To be completely honest, I firmly discourage using tumblr to find work or expand your art career territory. It’s more of a place to find your cult following, which is often broke but usually absolutely feral (positive) about your work and it’s wonderful for the mind. But it is not really conducive for making money, so I would recommend having it as a word-of-mouth sort of location and a place to be casual rather than part of your professional sphere.
That’s just me tho. Plenty of folks have done EXTREMELY well for themselves on tumblr, but times have changed and so has the site. A tumblr follower count really does means fuck all, so like… idk.
also the CEO is acting like a bully that needs serious intervention, so i wouldn’t put too many eggs in this basket tbh.
Comment on other people's stuff, repost other people's stuff.
The art world is built on reciprocity. We’re all broke and we’re all struggling, so kindness and “plugging” is our most common currency.
In order to have a healthy and supportive community, you need to start building one. If you want supportive community members, you need to be one. If you want comments on your work? Leave comments on other’s work. If you want people to repost/reblog your stuff? Repost other people’s stuff!
It’s really simple but I think people forget how simple it is to give in order to receive. If you show up to the community and provide support and friendliness, folks will notice! And they’ll wanna help you too.
But the thing about this that sucks so bad about this is that posting and commenting and scrolling demands a shit ton of mental energy. Idk about you but I’m disabled. I usually wake up with less energy than I did before going to bed. Needing to have energy to do this and then just not having energy to do this makes this routine particularly difficult.
But the fact of the matter is if i want to keep expanding i gotta maintain my homie status. I gotta keep commenting, I gotta keep reposting.
therefore it’s critical that we:
Have a logout time. Have regular days off. Rest.
Every day that you plan to do your work, have a timer/limit for socmed stuff, and have a logout time that is strict.
If you dont do this you I can basically guarantee that eventually it will make you go insane. I am speaking from experience. I became a workaholic and went insane and it was really bad!
But NOW I do my socmed management in the morning from 9 to 11, log out for the day at about 4 or 5 pm, and I log out for the weekend from Friday night to Monday morning. Confirmed: I am now at least 60% less insane.
Keeping a distance from this stuff is important. It’s ok to do a little extracurricular posting here and there (sometimes I do a little over the weekend!) but I am begging you to not let it become a habit. This shit will ruin your life for real. I’ve seen it happen to peers, it’s happened to me, and the damage is done way faster than you think.
Make new posts of old work.
The techlord beasts of silicon valley convinced us that we have to only post new work all the time, and they did this to us because they’re evil lmao
You don’t need to do this. You actually can repost your old stuff. You can. I promise. It’s fine, and it’s a great idea even.
It’s practical too! Because you have absolutely have followers that haven’t seen the pieces you’re reposting, and you absolutely have followers who would be happy to see it again.
Sometimes I’ll take a couple of my old pieces, group them together in a post them with a couple words, and then just post that. Sometimes I’ll do a theme! like color, or a certain ship/pairing, or all my neon-heavy pieces, or a bunch of illustrations of Ross wearing his stupid shirts. I’ll take stuff that’s even like 3 years old and just repost it. Because it’s legal.
Limit what you do in a day. Try not to oversaturate the feed.
I have found the most success when I only make 1 or 2 posts 2 or 3 times in a day, MAXIMUM. After that I log out.
These posts will be a mix of:
- new art
- self reposts
- artshare stuff / “if u see this, post your [X]”
- WIPs/crops
When I say 1 or 2 posts, I mean I only make or repost one or two at a time, and only like two times in a day. This has a level of organic variation, but I try to make sure I don’t show up to the platform more than 3 times in a day.
This will prevent me from oversaturating my timeline (and the timeline of my followers) and it will prevent me from burning out.
If you have a lot of things you wanna say or post about, do that! But take a moment to consider “Is this something I can add to my backlog?”, or “Is this something I can schedule?” because you could be doing tomorrow’s work right now! And it’s a good idea to take advantage of that. :)
I’ve seen some people do 5-10 reposts in a row and that’s totally fine, but for me it makes the feed feel oversaturated and has even led me to mute or unfollow them because it was drowning out other folks in my feed.
With BKSY there’s ways to set up feeds and filters and stuff, but a lot of people do “out of the box” scrolling, where they dont do a lot to edit their experience beyond the surface levels of “block, mute, unfollow, add to filtered terms.”
You absolutely can post as much as you want and repost your work to your heart’s content! There are no rules for this and your web time should be something you enjoy. But also these are my tips and this is one of the tips where I recommend don’t doing that.
Finally: Numbers.
DO NOT LET YOURSELF BECOME CONSUMED BY NUMBER GO UP. DO NOT LET IT CONTROL YOUR RELATIONSHIP WITH YOURSELF, YOUR WORK, AND YOUR COMMUNITY. IT WILL MAKE YOU SICK. IT WILL ISOLATE YOU. IT CAN ALIENATE YOU. IT CAN KILL YOU.
I am not fucking playing right now.
I have seen so much discourse about number go up and posts about “big artists with big following dont get it” and shit like that. I am not “big artist” but I am telling you: this is the key to surviving the hellscape. If you let yourself equate your worth as a person with the numbers on your profile page, you will begin to fall ill and it can ruin everything that you’ve worked for.
It is
hard
to separate yourself from these numbers.
You post an illustration and feel like it immediately vanishes, or you have an opinion and your follower count goes down. You see someone you aren’t fond of gaining huge traction, or you see someone you admire seemingly being left behind.
like shit, just writing that? letting myself be aware of those things? it makes me feel Very Bad! I can’t stress enough how much I understand how absolutely shitty this can make a person feel.
This is why i am begging you to teach yourself how to ignore those numbers. It takes so much practice and it’s a lot of work to actively undo this. But those numbers are there for a reason. They are there to hook you but they’re also there to make you feel complexly shitty. They are part of a very real ploy to make you feel so badly about yourself that you will buy all kinds of stuff if it promises it will make you feel better.
Because if my number isn’t going up as much as I want, what do I do? I post more! I post more things and I post more often. I post desperately. I Post, I POST, and I continue to reliably provide content for the fucking platform.
If you acknowledge it as part of a system meant to break you, it can be easier to learn how to keep your distance from it.
Don’t
burn burn yourself out for these bastards. Don’t hurt yourself over this shit. They want you to care about these numbers so badly because it makes you work harder for them, for their shitty platform. THOSE bastards. THAT guy. fuckin… Emerald Prince McShit?? Don’t work for him, not for free! He doesn’t even like you, and besides you’re so much more.
You’re interesting and beautiful and more valuable to the beauty of our world than bastards like him ever could be.
You're an artist.
You’re a cool person. You’ve had relatable experiences. And you make beautiful things that the world deserves to see. Use the tools that you have, use the platforms you can still speak from, but don’t let these fuckers grind you down. Don’t let them take hold of you. You deserve more than to lose your days to this. You deserve more than a click count. You are more than your social media presence. You are more than your follower count.
You’re an artist.
Don’t do everything at once. Look at your previous accomplishments. Take breaks. Talk to a friend. Go outside. Log out.
You deserve to be well, and your art deserves to be seen. You always have.
I love you. I think you’re great. And I think you can do this. I do.
Remember who you are. Remember who you want to be. Remember that you deserve to be well. And remember that your work is worth making no matter what.
You’re wonderful, and you’re doing great.
Take good care, okay?
you got this.
love,
-Fox