Sometimes More is Just Too Much
I always find it interesting that I tend to re-evaluate things I’m doing toward the end of the month. I think part of it has to do with setting up my bullet journal for the next month. I look at my Google calendar, full of all these plans and goals, and get way overwhelmed. My to-do list has been more chaos and less creative recently. And looking closely I think I figured out why.
Over the past 2 months I’ve started a lot of things to try and increase my social media presence and reach. I was already posting daily on IG & FB, but put a plan in place to start posting at least once a day on TT. Part of it is selfish- I like making connections with people who love the same things I do. Part of it was peer pressure. That follower number is a really tempting carrot to judge success by. I hit 1,000 followers on IG this month. Yay! And increased my follower numbers on TikTok. Yay! But to what end or purpose?
I had fun making all of the content for a while. Then it started to feel like a chore. A job. An expectation I wasn’t excited about anymore. And it wasn’t fun anymore. The videos took a lot of time to create. And honestly, I started running out of ideas. What started as enthusiastic excitement spiraled into stress and anxiety. Making videos takes way more time than I thought it would. And finding just the right song became an obsession, and an even bigger stressor than making the actual video.
This past week, I started seeing people I follow on multiple platforms posting about how 1K should never be a magic number for receiving an ARC (advanced review/reader copy), and I did an honest-to-dog confused dog head tilt. I didn’t know that was a thing. I’ve completed a few ARC request forms through publishing promo houses that have asked about follower count, but I honestly didn’t think there was a specific threshold. I understand why they are asking for that number. Their job is getting the word out to as many readers as possible. So if they only have a specific number of ARCs to give out, they’re going to want to focus on accounts with higher follower numbers. Promo & publishing is a business. And those numbers are a big part of it. But I hadn’t heard the 1k thing until this past week. And yes, I was receiving ARCs from those promo houses long before I hit 1k. So I guess it depends on the company. Or that 1K number is just a BS judgement created in someone’s head. Who knows.
But the things they said made me stop and think about what I was doing. And why. And how.
Over the last 2 months, I’ve spent so much time trying to increase my followers, I’ve spread myself so thin on all platforms, that now I’m struggling to create content I like for 1 of those platforms and it’s really frustrating. I get that it’s a numbers game. It’s all about the algorithms. But it’s also all about my time. And my intentions. When I clocked the amount of time I spent creating content for that one platform, and realized how much other stuff I could have been doing, I was even more frustrated. Because, yeah, the effort worked for a while, but recently the returns are not as good. And I’m not having as much fun.
Here I am, the start of another month looming, and I have some decisions to make. By now, my next month’s bujo is usually complete and ready to go. I haven’t even started it yet. And that makes me sad.
So here I go, restating my intentions for my social media presence:
My social media goal is to make the most meaningful connections with like-minded readers, hype the hell out of my favorite authors, discover new authors to love & hype, and spread my joy of everything Romancelandia related.
What will that look like going forward? Not sure. It will definitely look like less time on one social media platform. Potentially more on another. It will look like reading more, and spending less time creating videos, so I can write more reviews and edit more books.
It will look like less time spent watching numbers climb or fall, and more time spent engaging with profiles and accounts I connect with organically.
It will also look like more time spent doing other things I love. More yoga. More knitting. More karate.
So, if you’re already following me, thank you! I’d love to hear your feedback and thoughts on different social media platforms you’re active on. And what you look for in content from your favorite accounts. Is there something you’d like to see more of from me? And what do you love to post the most? Let’s keep the connections flowing with joy, and lose the stress behind the socials.
Oh, and if you’re looking for social media platforms, here they are :-)
