Goodness me, such a busy week, I almost forgot to blog. This time of year is often very pressured for independents and non-academics with 31 March being a crucial end-of-financial-year deadline by which many projects must be finished and invoices paid. So much so that I haven’t been around on social media anywhere near as much as usual.
Nevertheless, in the last couple of weeks, I have passed the 3,000 follower mark on Twitter, hit 200 followers on Instagram, and reached the magic 500+ on LinkedIn. Ding!
I’ve been on Twitter since 2009 and Instagram since 2014, so these figures aren’t particularly impressive. Publishers, for example, don’t start taking notice till you reach 10,000 followers on Twitter and Instagram. Part of the reason is I’ve never tried to attract followers, other than by being around and talking to people, and following those I feel a connection with. Others take very different approaches. I know a fiction writer on Instagram, someone I’ve met IRL a couple of times, who reached 10,000 followers in less than a year and is now coaching other writers on how to attract followers like honeysuckle attracts bees. She wrote a blog post with a few pointers, such as: choose, and stick to, a colour palette, so that when someone looks at your Instagram profile and sees your last nine photos, they give a coherent message. There were other tips, like how to schedule posts for maximum impact, all of which seemed entirely feasible to implement.
So, I thought, I could do that.
I’d probably sell more books that way.
But.
I can’t do that.
I simply can’t bring myself to be so contrived. It’s not me at all. The thought of choosing a colour palette, and scheduling my posts for maximum impact, makes me feel queasy.
One of the things I love about social media is the randomness. Yesterday I mislaid my landline handset, wailed on Twitter, and a woman from Brisbane told me how to find it. On Instagram I seek out interesting academics and I talk to a Romanian woman studying for a PhD in Japan, a Dutch academic in America, an Australian academic in America, and so on. The glimpses of their lives are fascinating to me; I hope mine are to them.
I should take the ‘colour palette’ approach; it’s sensible marketing. I should create and nurture a brand for myself. To an extent, this blog has a colour palette. The designer friend who made it for me asked what my favourite colours were; I told her; she liked and used those colours. But I don’t pick photos in those colours for my blog posts (though I did for this post, because I came across one on freeimages.com and it amused me), and I certainly can’t Instagram everything in purple, turquoise, and hot pink. It would be exhausting even to try.
I was musing about all this to a friend who is quite the social media expert.
“I just like, y’know, hanging out with people online,” I said. “I don’t want to do this ‘brand’ thing. I want the weird, the random, the serendipitous. I like making friends.”
“That,” he said, “that IS your brand.”
I guess he’s right. It’s not much of a brand, though, in marketing terms. It’s just me, bimbling around online like I do offline, forgetting things sometimes, doing my best. I could change; I could do this whole thing differently. Maybe, sometime in the future, I will. But, for now… I don’t want to put myself under the pressure of trying to present myself as something I’m not, something polished and shiny. It would be too much like having a proper job. So I shall carry on dropping in and out of social media as I please, chatting when I have something to say, and otherwise lurking or taking time out. That makes me happy. And while my approach may not sell as many books as the ‘colour palette’ system, it has made me some great friends and taken me all around the world. So, in my terms, it works just fine.
Helen Kara 
Hurrah! I am so with you here. Human relationships are what everything, absolutely everything, is about. Not “brands.” I understand that it’s necessary to market one’s business — but in my opinion, that does not mean turning ONESELF into a monetary object called a “brand.”
In recent years, I have become distrustful and indeed suspicious of any world view that considers the “value” of human beings only to be monetary and nothing else. Buyers are not “sources of income,” and sellers are not “producers.” They are human beings, and everything else is what they DO, not what they ARE. The “value” of a human life is not to be found on a spreadsheet. There is so much more to human beings than how much money one can siphon out of their pockets or what their “earning potential” is.
For similar reasons, I no longer speak of “consumers.” I speak of customers. People are not “taxpayers” — they are citizens. They are, first and foremost, PEOPLE. The human race managed to survive for ten thousand years of history before the johnny-come-lately, capitalism, was ever invented. But humans themselves have been interesting and fascinating and creative and brilliant and bright and spectacular for every one of those ten thousand years.
So, um, yeah. Social media to discover new, fascinating, scintillating people? With maybe some business relationships developing out of that, just as an occasional side effect among many other fantastic side effects? Oh yes. That’s how the priorities should work.
Sorry for the rant. You may have guessed that I have strong opinions about this. 🙂
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Absolutely no need to apologise, Phyl, particularly as you agree with me! (Dissenting views also welcome here though.) I applaud and cheer your points, and thank you for making them here.
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