I used to think social media was fun. I loved scrolling Facebook and Instagram for news and stories about the lives of my friends and family. It was a great way to stay in touch. It was also a great way to promote my scrapbooking events…or at least it was at first. When I first started hosting scrapbooking events and fundraisers, I was marketing mostly to my friends and family, and it was a great way to get the information out to a lot of people very quickly. I could create an event, and invite all my connections; the resulting event page served as a great way to pass information and updates to the attendees.
Eventually, I created business pages for Crafty Neighbor and Crafty Neighbor Travel, my crafting event company and my travel agency, respectively. I needed to market to others – people outside my friends list. I paid for advertising, boosted my posts, made use of groups, tagged other pages, you name it. None of it worked. I never had a single viral post, and my likes and followers never went much beyond friends of friends. Because of this, I decided to really learn how to make it work for me. I’ve lost count of the number of workshops and webinars that promised me success in marketing my business via social media. If everything these people were selling was true, I would have been the next Grumpy Cat by now. Instead, I have just over 1,000 followers on my craft business, under 200 on my travel site, and less than that for Modern Musings. Why is that?
The page with the most followers, Crafty Neighbor, is the page where I have the least activity and consistency, but I also seem to have the most engagement. When I post craft projects, sales, or news, I often have friends and followers who comment on or like the posts. It doesn’t make sense to me, because it goes against everything all those workshops have taught me about building an audience. My posts are sporadic…when I remember to do it. Sometimes I go months without making a post. I don’t respond to messages or reply to comments because I have my notifications turned off. I do not pay to boost my posts and I don’t buy advertising. Most of the posts I do make on that page are reposts of content I posted on Instagram.
By comparison, Crafty Neighbor Travel and Modern Musings actually do have regularly scheduled content. Christen creates weekly posts on Instagram to share our upcoming topics, and Amber’s always putting together some kind of TikTok video or posting links to her blog posts. We also post polls and conversation starters on our Modern Musings chat group MMC Chat. For my Travel page, I actually have a service that posts curated content for me on a regular basis. And yet neither of these two pages get much interaction or engagement at all. I can’t figure out why. I’ve done everything the “experts” say I should do, but it just doesn’t work.
It’s a problem of algorithms. Facebook is constantly tweaking the algorithms that control what pops up in your feed. Once upon a time, everything you followed or subscribed to showed up there. But as Facebook became more and more greedy, they began tweaking those algorithms to show more and more of the content Facebook wants you to see and less and less of the other stuff. In fact, most of the time even my personal posts don’t get seen by friends and family because Facebook prioritizes paid content over personal or unpaid. My feed is filled with paid ads, often for products I couldn’t care less about, and all the joy of mindlessly scrolling through the posts of my friends and the content I do care about has been reduced to a handful of posts between a series of advertisements. And now that Facebook owns Instagram, they have corrupted it in the same way. Gone are the days when I could follow my favorite designers and artists for inspiration. I’m lucky if I get one good crafty post out of a 30-45 minute scroll.
So what’s a girl (or business) to do? The very thing that I hate most about Facebook and Instagram is supposedly the best way to reach potential clients and viewers. But is it? I no longer pay to boost or promote my posts and I don’t place ads. I prefer to increase my “reach” organically through quality content, consistent posting, and engagement with my followers. So when you see here on the blog or hear us on the podcast asking you to “like” our content, give us a good rating, or comment on our posts, that is because the algorithms favor content that has engagement. Posts that have a lot of “likes” will be sent higher up in the feed, while posts that have no comments will wallow at the bottom of the list, possibly to never be seen at all.
So if you have favorite content creators you follow, or you want to see more from your friends and family, be sure to “like” their posts and actually “subscribe” to their pages and channels. Comment on their content. Share the posts you love with like-minded people. It’s the only way to take back our social media from the powers that want to shove paid advertising down our throats and control what we see. Let the people you follow know that you appreciate the content they are creating so that they are encouraged to keep creating more. Otherwise, there will be nothing left but the ads, and I don’t think any of us want to see that.
Have you tried boosting a Facebook post or purchasing ads on Facebook or Instagram for your business? Was it successful? Do you struggle to have your posts seen while missing out on content from your friends and family? Let us know in the comments below, or join us on MMC Chat for a discussion of the pros and cons of social media.
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