Instagram. It was once a place of unrivalled online connection, eye opening visuals and joy! Instagram was the app that held the little people up higher than we’d ever been! It opened up possibilities of being discovered through the use of tags (@) and hashtags (#) and some well-known person or brand seeing your work or images. And now… it’s just not really serving me anymore.
The more time I spend on social media, the less I get out.
The fun and learning and connection feels like it’s dropping away in the face of THE ALGORITHM. A power I don’t really understand much, except that it mainly seems to be causing problems for small businesses and for the mental health of users. I have no more engagement on my posts now than I did eight years ago and I put just as much time in. That could be for a hundred reasons.
But basically I’m looking at the balance of time spent there versus happiness, sales or a positive gain of any kind and I’m coming up short.
It has given me the nudge I need to go back about 15 years in my online life and return to the idea of a more analogue, opt-in method of communicating with the people I want to connect with - the humble mailing list. I have kicked off with a ‘call to action’ comic (you can see the whole 20 panel comic right here or ironically - on instagram. I imagine the making of the mailing list each time will be a fair bit of work, but it has also brought me back to the one place on the internet that is 100% mine. This website. I’m putting in blog posts that have been languishing in the drafts, updating bits of the shop, listing new products, making sure the illustration and comics sections are up to date - I even put the contact page back in.
Thinking about what to put in the mailing list is making me get things done - some of the things I have been putting off for a long time. That can only be good, right?
It’s making me take stock - a great thing to do in the Spring when everything feels like it’s just about to really get going. It’s also something I can do from bed with my usual Eastertime cold.
