Beyond Instagram: Diversify, but be conscious about it.
Diversify the way you present your work online. But be aware of the nature of your audience.
Dear friends,
time passed way too quickly, and for the first time I feel the need to apologise that this issue is coming so late. Lot’s of work, change of weather and you know…the usual excuses. But time is passing anyway, and this is already part three of the Beyond Instagram series on this newsletter.
Read the past issues here:
Today, I want to dive a little deeper into different practical means to share your work online and how I personally use it. Plus a few more philosophical questions on why and how we are posting online.
First of all, I think it’s important to talk about motivations. Why stay present online? What defines your audience? Where should your focus be?
AUDIENCE
As I mentioned in the past newsletters, I’m using Instagram primarily as a space to explore and share my personal work, with some bits and pieces of professional work sparkled in over time. I found that Instagram is a space to connect and find new people and stay in contact. Within, but not limited to the photography realm. For sure, I’ve got art directors, photo editors and clients among my followers, but my primary goal is to connect with a wider, photography interested, audience.
I truly enjoy to communicate with a much different range of creators outside of photography as well. Graphic designers, illustrators, writers, artists, filmmakers and people across all the different disciplines of creativity.
Unlike other, very medium-centric platforms, Instagram is the one social media tool that possibly combines all the different art forms into one place. In the best case it is inspiring, in the worst case it’s a cluttered mess of stuff you didn’t subscribe to. A trash bag of silly content that you wish you didn’t see and all the buzz that’s out in the world. And it adds a good portion to the mental noise that life can bring by itself if used in a compulsive and very unregulated way.
Most of the connections we are building on social media are weak connectional links. It’s like a handshake and a warm hello with people vaguely interested in you for various reasons that might not even be your work. That doesn’t automatically turn them into people that get inspired by your work, give you assignments or share your stuff with colleagues…or subscribe to your newsletter, opting-in on something that is far more personal and close to the heart.
Building strong relationships takes time, and it works the same online as offline. The strongest human connections exist in a space of mutual trust and sympathy, the willingness to share and to be open and honest.
Professional connections share the same fate:
I’m still in regular contact with many of the photo editors that I started to work with when I was at the beginning of my career. I share a long lasting mutual sympathy or even a loose friendship with some of these folks, celebrated in annual meet-ups or occasional drinks. These are the people that I value the most professionally and personally. And these are the people that help me to sustain my business and help me thrive. And sometimes they change positions and take me with them, which is the biggest sign of trust.
These contacts cannot be created by simply spamming the social media sphere with content.
Some words of appreciation can help to open an honest conversation. Being open to help out in one way or another is a big plus too. Being a resource is key.
DIVERSIFY YOUR OUTPUT, BUT BE CONSCIOUS ABOUT IT
Every time I open up Youtube these days, I get bombarded with ads from self-proclaimed marketing experts. Most of the time they are slick, suit-wearing bro’s wearing Rolex watches that try to sell me the one and only roadmap to social media marketing success. For sure, I’m getting targeted by the algorithm because I’ve put a lot of hours into research of the topic, but still there seems to be a big market and a lot of insecurities out there.
But there ain’t a singular, one size fits all concept for marketing your work on- and offline. And in the special case of photography, and probably any other creative profession, it is an highly individual one and completely depends on the type of audience you want to target, the types of clients you want to address and the kind of work you are doing in the first place.
To outline my thoughts, let me elaborate on my personal approach towards marketing my work. For simplicity reasons I’m only going to cover my online endeavours first.
Nowadays, the central hub for my work is divided in two places: First and foremost, my own personal website. This is the place where I present and update my professional and personal work on a regular basis. This is where my client list and contact information lives.
I built and designed my website myself, using Lay Theme. I chose Lay Theme for the huge feature set and great tools, specifically made for portfolio websites. And I truly like that there is a one time payment only, with free support forever. Armin and his team are doing a great job implementing new and exciting features and are always there to help, although it takes a lot more time and effort to set up a Wordpress-based website. But it’s worth the hustle.
You can find Lay Theme here. (Full disclosure: I’m a long time customer, plus I know Armin personally and this is an affiliate link. I get a 20% commission off if you buy using this link. If you want to check it out, feel free to use this link and support me and this newsletter. Promotion time over! Thank you!)
And of course I’m linking towards this very newsletter and to my Instagram account.
The second place where my professional and personal work finds it’s home is my agent’s website. We certainly share most of the same work, with a more diverse selection of series on my agents website. Tatjana and me are talking regularly about our strategy, the clients we want to work for and how to communicate our output. And she is feeding her own, agency Instagram account as well with announcements of new work.
My personal Instagram on the other hand is quite experimental. This is the place where I share my passion projects, my experiments, updates on work that I really like and insights into my process. This is the way i deliberately chose to communicate: being open about my process and curious in my approach. I use it as a newsfeed, an online extension of my very-offline sketchbook, a place for experiments and a portfolio of work. I don’t limit myself to only one medium on Instagram, as much as I do in real life. I rather experiment with different forms of expression: photography, collage, moving image, writing and most of the time it’s huge fun filling it.
I try not to overthink what I post there, I rather tend towards the principle of publish and forget, where the mere act of “i liked this piece of work and i want to share it with you” outweighs the presumed importance of how pretty your feed looks or taking too much care for the vanity metrics.
I see my Instagram account as my means to being able to follow the thread of inspiration without knowing or really caring too much about where it will take me. As I do with all of my personal projects.
I’m really considerate when it comes to my website on the other hand. I tend to spend a lot of time on the edit, the selection of images and the sequences before I upload anything to my archive or the overview.
Out of curiosity, I tried TikTok for the first time. Before my tiny first steps I outrightly refused to spend more time on this chaotic, hectic app. It is specifically designed to shorten our already very short attention spans and hijacks our dopamine receptor in an ultra-brutal, ultra-capitalist way. And it’s actually the first time I worried about giving away my data as it’s very unclear what ByteDance tracks and where my data is sold. Especially as the app uses third-party trackers, and probably shares the data with the Chinese government.
But I gave it a try anyway, for research purposes as I reassured myself. Creating on the platform, at first, is genuinely fun. Clever tools and fast satisfaction with high distribution among the huge user base.
But the chaos and the nagging feeling of being dependent on the grace of yet another, demon-like algorithm came back. And yet again, I questioned myself if I want to feed another audience with presumably even shorter attention spans? Are these the people that I want to reach or is it another platform that I use in a sense of fear to miss out? Who are the people that use the app on a regular basis? What’s the demographic? Are potential and actual clients on the platform?
To make it short, it was not worth it. The few people that kept me interested enough to watch their content didn’t justify the sheer chaos and mess that got shoved through my phone, directly overclocking my hypothalamus in a bad way.
Here is a short think-piece on TikTok and the massive influence it has on (young, but not only) people:
TikTok Is Now Way Worse Than You Thought
So in conclusion: My personal and professional work as well as my writing and projects live on three different platforms right now. With a strong focus on personal stuff on Instagram and Substack and professional work on my website. I don’t feel the need to expand to yet another player in the filed right now. And Twitter gave me headaches, although I occasionally use it to announce new newsletter issues or to re-tweet stuff I like.
In my opinion, one of the worst things you can do is to create a piece of content and just mindlessly share it on every platform without taking any consideration of your audience. A piece of video shoved into Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook in a burst, without any consideration feels heavily like spam.
Additionally, because the internet moves so fast, it’s tempting to try to catch up with the things that surround you and therefore there is the trap of only performing into what brands or the audience want to see. Operating from an internal and authentic source of what you really want to do and have to say takes time.
This is the reason why most of the stuff you see on social media looks the same, because it’s so much easier to make things where the recipe is already there.
There is no strategy. Everybody who wants to sell you the perfect media plan is a liar. Or simply building upon seemingly proven formulae that produce boring work and already trampled paths. Take your time, know who you want to communicate with through your work and don’t take too much consideration into the metrics.
On a side note: It’s important to realise that you don’t own your social media account. We’ve discussed this a few times in our photography group, and I heard from a lot of other photographers that suddenly got blocked, hacked or got their accounts deactivated for various reasons. This could happen to you anytime, and everyone that had this issue is reporting the same thing: It’s impossible to contact any sort of customer support. Having one place where your work lives exclusively, on a webspace that you own is crucial. Instagram doesn’t replace a portfolio website and is not a one stop shop to market your work.
I’m taking a short break from this series over the course of the next newsletters. I just finished another sketchbook that I want to share with you, and I want to explore different new ways in this newsletter that I’m really excited about.
The series will resume in a few weeks, featuring an in-depth view into your own personal website and what’s important to know, as well as a long-overdue insight into the offline world.
Talk soon!
xoxo
Ramon
THINGS I’VE LEARNED / DISCOVERED THIS WEEK
This is an ongoing collection of stuff that I’ve learned or discovered over the last two weeks. A regular collection that caught my attention and tickled my brain, or simply proved to be useful for me and that I want to share with you.
1 - ROBBY MÜLLER - LIVING THE LIGHT
A fascinating insight into the work and life of dutch cinematographer Robby Müller. A love letter to cinema and light.
Robby Müller (1940 - 2018) was a long time collaborator of Wim Wenders, Jim Jarmusch and Lars von Trier.
For her extraordinary film essay, Living the Light, Director and Director of Photography Claire Pijman had access to the thousands of Hi8 video diaries, pictures and Polaroids that Müller photographed while he was at work on one of the more than 70 features he shot throughout his career. It’s like an intimate diary and an insight into the mind of one of the greatest cinematographers of our time.
Excellent, as usual. "Operating from an internal and authentic source of what you really want to do and have to say takes time." Exactly, and there are things that takes a week to fully understand, others weeks, and some years of course. The risk for the sometimes lonely creature that is the writer or the artist is the instant gratification of social media disturbing this process, and lead into creative dead ends.