Creative Writing Wizard

In whatever you do,
be it educating, entertaining, or encouraging,
celebrate when you’ve done so for one.

Glen Weatherhead

We live in a social age that prioritizes maximizing engagement and mastering algorithms, often with the aspiration of going viral or amassing a large following. This can especially be true for us as creatives when we’ve created something and we’re excited to share it with the world. We want people to enjoy the creation just as much as we do!

One of the tools that makes it easy to do so is social media. While we can gain exposure and potentially global reach, social media is constantly putting ways for us to measure our engagement ‘performance’ and actively encourages the pursuit for more (be it views, plays, likes, shares, comments, followers, subscribers, etc).

How do we navigate the benefits of social media while also not getting pulled into the numbers-game?

Or what about when we have something to share, but it ‘only’ reaches a handful of people?

This while we see some people making content and getting millions of engagements. A common phrase I’ve seen repeated on socials is something along the lines of ‘shouting in the void’ when something we share doesn’t ‘perform’ as well as we had thought, expected, or hoped.

Create for You

Before we get into some of the perspectives I’ve found helpful when it comes to social media engagement, I feel something I often need to remind myself is the ‘why’ of why I’m creating. In my personal experience and in talking with other creatives, when we create solely for other people or look for external motivation to creating, there’s a higher chance of burnout.

While I’ve found several strategies to help minimize this creative burnout, one of the most helpful things I’ve found is making sure that what I’m creating is something I enjoy. I do hope that other people enjoy my art, music, or writing, but I initially create it because it’s something I want to make. I make something that I love and am excited about. Out of this love and excitement, I then want others to feel something from it and so I share it with others.

My (Failed) Attempts Maximizing Reach

I recently watched a video where Jack Conte, musician and co-founder of Patreon, talked about the changes of the internet and social media over the past few decades. He called it ‘Death of the Follower & the Future of Creativity on the Web’ (worth a watch, its quite inspiring). He gave an interesting overview of the past decades and how the way that we interact with content on the web has changed over the years. For the purposes of this blog post, there were two major points that I found really resonated with me.

The first point was, in talking about the shift from early social media to more current, is this mental shift from thinking “what do I want to create” to “what will the algorithm rank well”. This can be most readily seen by platforms like TikTok with their ‘for you’ pages. As a creative who has dabbled in these areas, I can attest to having felt this mental shift.

When I first started on social media, I started with the idea of sharing what I’m working on because it’s what I’m enjoying and I wanted to share that enjoyment with others. But as I continued on social media, I felt myself shifting what I was creating and thinking about things like ‘trending topics’ or ‘popular hashtags’. I’d try to keep up to date with what other people were doing and what was popular and then try to do something similar. I had a handful of short videos cross certain number thresholds when I did this, but at the end of it I felt like I had to keep going and pumping out more ‘trending’ content to keep that feeling going.

What once was something I enjoyed (writing, music, art), had become a chore. Instead of doing art based on what I wanted to do, I was thinking about what kind of art was popular. Instead of writing full songs, I switched to 5-15 second sound-byte style riffs that I didn’t do anything more with. It didn’t take me long to burn out with this way of going about it.

The Rule of One

Having burnt out on the ‘maximizing reach’ methodology pretty quickly, I took a few weeks off from social media as I reevaluated what exactly I was doing with my time on socials. After much thought, the moments that stood out to me weren’t when I had a post cross some mental threshold in terms of engagement numbers, the thing that stood out was the handful of people who seemed to have really enjoyed what I created or were encouraged by a post I wrote.

I also found that anytime I measured the ‘performance’ of my posts, that it was never enough. If I got tens, hundreds, or thousands, it felt cool for a moment but didn’t last. On the flip side, I’d often feel like a failure if my post didn’t get ‘picked up’ by the algorithm and frustrated after spending a considerable amount of time in the creation of the content and the process of sharing it.

After feeling like I too was ‘shouting in the void’, I started to question how I was looking at engagements and interactions on social media. This led me to refine what my baseline expectation or goal is that I look for in terms of engagements on social media, which I call ‘the rule of one’.

Celebrate when you’ve reached one.

Social media likes us to think that reaching more is better, and you’ll see them reference that in terminology like ‘performance metrics’ or when they highlight you crossing a number threshold. While I do think it’s important to celebrate milestones and progress, I personally try to not get too attached to the number of engagements past getting one.

If I post something on Threads and one person liked, commented, or shared it then I’ll have checked that little box in my mind that’s trying to validate the ‘performance’ of the posts. I can then disassociate my attachment to the number increasing and instead can focus on what matters more to me, which is authentic engagement and connecting with fellow creatives or creative-enjoyers.

Another way I’ve found to achieve this is by posting similar content to more than one platform. When making Reels-like content, I’d share it on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube shorts. Or if its text-based, I’d post to Threads, X, and Facebook. By doing so, the odds are I’ll get at least one engagement from one of the sites. (As a short note, I still tend to focus most of my time on one platform primarily, IG for Pictures/Short videos, Threads for text. But if I’m posting to these, it’s usually not too much effort to also post on the others.)

Understand the ‘Game’

Another important thing to keep in the back of our minds is, social media platforms are run by businesses. At the end of the day, they’ll do what helps support their bottom line. Their primary goal isn’t usually to support creatives or to help small businesses grow, their primary goal is usually something along the lines of time spent or attention given to their platform (and by extension their products and advertisers). While I do want to be careful not to be too salty about ‘big tech’, it can be helpful to level set what kind of actions they’re trying to drive.

When I’m using socials, I try to be very intentional in my usage. This may sound like a fairly self-explanatory and obvious thing, but it wasn’t obvious to me. I needed a shift, but didn’t realize it until I started tracking time spent on socials and saw in some weeks I was using social apps up to 40 hours in a week. This was further reinforced by my reading of the book Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport that it really clicked in my mind.

Newport in his book talks about how today’s tech is built to hook us as consumers and explains some of the ways they do it. He focuses then on how to use technology in a way that is intentional. I found that what he talked about is just as applicable for content creators and creatives sharing to these platform. Choosing to be intentional with how and why we’re using these apps and recognizing that these apps have their own goals, often different from our own. By reading this book I periodically remind myself:

Social media isn’t built for me.
Social media is built for its business.

Maybe when they started out, social media companies do want to focus on the creatives, but along the way, they tend to head the same way. Social media companies make money for time spent on their platform or through their paid features, so they’ll encourage the pursuit of things that ultimately lead people to spend more time on their apps, buying features/products, and consuming ads.

Knowing this has helped me to ignore many of the ways they try to entice me to make more content than is sustainable or make content I’d rather not. This knowledge has also helped me to largely ignore the constant drive for bigger numbers.

A Short Aside

The majority of this post is focused on a creative type sharing works for fun. You may be using social media as a form of income or to support your business, and this does require a different perspective. You will likely want to pay attention to some of the metrics to measure how successful your posts are in attracting customers. You will also likely be keeping track of what works well on social media.

There are elements to “The Rule of One” that can apply to people selling or promoting product, though how you apply it may be different than the exact ways I mention here.

Conclusion

In closing, I wanted to highlight another line from the talk from Jack Conte (the second point that really resonated with me). He said,

If you’re not connecting as much with your audience as you want to… that doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with you.

He continues by saying that as creatives we often feel the desire to improve, which is a good thing, but he reminds us that there’s nothing wrong with you if your post doesn’t get the reach or engagement you thought it would.

There are always things we can learn or try to do to navigate these tools better, but the ‘performance’ we see on these apps doesn’t define the quality of what we’re trying to share or us personally as creatives.

If you have a creative spark in you and you create something, that’s awesome!

If you created something and you’d like to share with others, great!

Try to not get too attached to the numbers of engagements or the ‘performance’ metrics. It doesn’t define the value of what you’ve made and it doesn’t define you. Celebrate if you get one interaction, and focus on making authentic connections.

If you found this post helpful, consider sharing it with others. As creatives,  let’s support each other and share great resources with one another so that together we can continue to do what we love. Create!

Stay Creative,

– Glen Weatherhead

References

• Death of the Follower & the Future of Creativity on the Web by Jack Conte  https://youtu.be/hwn6-8XpIuE?si=WYQMH87cmpZxWdC4
• Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World by Cal Newport https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40672036-digital-minimalism