Do creators really need the social media?

If you were Shakespeare, you might be able to get by without them, but you are not. So bite the bullet, make that TikTok, it is the only way to gain an audience! ...or is it?

Imagine this: you sit down, fully determined to finally do the thing — to paint, to compose, to write that next chapter or to outline the next part of your dissertation. But a few minutes pass and your mind gets flooded with doubts and questions. What is the best perspective? Is your research really complete? Which canvas to use?

Creating something out of nothing is hard. It requires making choices, sticking to them, and pushing through the walls of self-doubt that keep showing up in your way.

But as we hesitate when faced with a choice, the easy solution pops into our head. So we open the browser — just to research a thing or two, just to get some inspiration to get started.

And like Alice stepping into the rabbit hole, we fall into the crutches of social media.

Three hours later, you’ve researched a tiny bit, but ultimately end up with more questions than before. It seems there are some options you have never even heard of; now you need to consider them too. You’ve also checked other people’s progress — She published another comic strip this week? And he wrote how many words today?

With all that new baggage in your mind, the idea of throwing all your creative tools outside the window, grabbing a box of ice cream and binging some brainless TV show is starting to look strangely appealing.

Dang it! And you’ve started the day with a clear mind and tank full of creative energy! What the hell happened with all that potential?

I hate it, but I have to be here

We need our attention to be creative. Social media need our attention to stay afloat and sell our time and focus to the advertisers. It’s a conflict of interest — we need the opposite of what social media needs from us.

On one hand, the solution couldn’t be simpler. We are in power here, we decide what we give our attention to. If we switch off Facebook, Instagram or TikTok, they can’t kick our door out and drag us with them against our will. But so much for theory.

In practice, social media companies hire an army of behavioral psychologists whose sole purpose is to figure out a way to prevent us from switching off those apps. So yes, they can’t kick out your door, but they can sit under it and yowl for the whole night, begging you to open.

So while we are in control, they still have a lot of power in this battle. They have psychological tricks on their side, and we only have our will to be creative. But even that can be used against us!

Social media companies will bend over backwards to convince us that we need to promote our art online, to connect with other artists through their platforms; they assure us that using their platforms is the only way to make our art known to the potential audience.

Sounds tempting, sounds plausible, sounds like… we don’t have any other choice but to be on those platforms. How many artists have you seen out there who say “I hate it, but I feel I have to be here”?

Social media — the necessary evil?

But do we really have to?

Guys, I have to admit, I got no clue. Sorry to pretend otherwise. Maybe it is true that nowadays without a broad social media presence creators have no way to get an audience. Maybe dancing on TikTok truly is the best way to promote your novel.

But I refuse. I refuse to believe this. This is the choice I am making now. It may backfire, I may go back on it, time will tell. But the current state of the matters is: I can’t be on socials if I truly want to make progress with my art.

On top of that, since I am attempting to be a writer, I would like to be known and recognized through my writing. Not through a YouTube channel, where I present top ten ways to start your novel.

To be clear, I am not dissing YouTubers; quite the opposite — I truly believe it takes a lot of time and effort to produce quality YouTube content. And since my time and effort is extremely limited, I would rather put it into getting better at writing, and not into learning how to set up proper camera lighting.

I am also a little bit tired of people talking about how one needs to focus and fight distractions, all while promoting their Instagram or TikTok feeds. It feels to me like a dietician lecturing about the benefits of a low-calorie diet, who then hands out -20% coupons for McDonald’s at the end of his speech. It does not inherently mean that the speech beforehand was full of crap, but man, you are not making a coherent impression.

So here I am, choosing to write a newsletter instead, and thus staying within the medium that I also want to get good at.

But the numbers!

Ah yes, the numbers. It does seem to be way easier to get the first 1000 followers on TikTok or Insta rather than though newsletter. So let’s think about those numbers a bit closer.

I am no marketing expert, but it seems to me that when you want to promote your writing, it may be best to focus your efforts on people who are… readers. And so I am going out on a limb and guessing that, statistically speaking, I’ve got more chance of finding a person open to reading long texts on Substack rather than on YouTube or TikTok. Clearly, a lot of people from Substack are also watching YouTube, but the relation probably doesn’t match that well the other way around.

Finally, I have read some statistics shared by people who have had both social media presence and a newsletter for a long time. And it seems that, oftentimes, the social media audience is… not your real audience. It’s a bunch of people who may leave a like under your social media content, but who are often far away from willing to actually support your art. You know, with actual money.

In other words, if you promote a book through a newsletter and check the percentage of people who subscribe versus who truly bought the book, and compare these numbers to those based on your social media —the results are hugely in favor of the newsletter. It seems that you can have ten times more followers on social media than your newsletter subscribers, and yet it is still the newsletter that is ultimately going to bring you more actual engagement.

Important disclaimer: I am considering here only the matter of long term working strategies, and not the matter of sheer luck and virality. Yes, TikTok seems to offer this vague chance of your art going extremely viral and selling a million copies out of the blue, but let’s be real — hitting an algorithmic jackpot is not a viable strategy. It’s closer to playing a slot machine in Vegas. And just as I don’t play those nor do I put money into lottery tickets, I would rather attempt to build an audience in a slow and organic manner (with a GOTS certificate, if you may), rather than pray for the algorithm’s favor.

So if you are anything like me: a creator who wants to create, but is overwhelmed by this necessity to be on social media, consider this: maybe this necessity is manufactured. Maybe it’s bringing us, creators, more harm than good in the long run. And maybe, just maybe, we don’t have to play this game.

And this is what I currently think.

Stay focused on your art,

Robin Wren