Tips for handling disheartenment with social media (and March Meet the Maker updates)
Every year I get excited when March rolls around and the March Meet the Maker prompts are released. My brain gets super into planning and organising Instagram posts so I can post as much as possible during March. This year was no exception.
However, with the upcoming market and shop drop in early April I decided not to do every day, I planned out ideas for 15 of the 23 prompts for the month with a mixture of grid posts, stories, and reels.
For those of you who don't know #MarchMeetTheMaker is a month long challenge run by Joanne Hawker, a creative from the UK. It's aimed at smaller creatives with the idea of meeting new friends and discovering new people. The list of prompts cover a range of topics and themes intended to show yourself and your brand in the best way possible.
So how did it go?
Well as you can imagine I was rather on to it at the beginning of the month, I had most of my posts already created and ready to go and even had captions written for some of them. Super organised! As the month passed I was less organised as more of my focus went on the new shop collection. I'm really happy I managed to post 12 out of the 15 days I had planned for.
In the past few years that I've participated in this challenge I usually gain a fair chunk of new followers, lovely new people I can welcome into my wee community and share my business with. This year however I think I actually lost followers. Now I know Instagram is not all about your follower count but when you put all this work into sharing these pieces with your community and the greater creative community it's a little disheartening to lose followers.
I don't really know the reasoning behind it, whether it was because I was posting less grid posts as I was posting more reels this year than previous years. Or whether it was just because there's a pandemic happening in the world I don't know. What I do know is this isn't going to stop me. I enjoyed posting this month, I even made my first stop motion for the grid which was really fun!
Handling disheartenment with social media
As I mentioned before it's not about the numbers but we're all human, we all want lots of lovely people in our wee community that love our work and encourage your endeavours right? So spending a lot of time on a post and having it bomb, or doing a challenge that's aimed at building your community only to lose followers, it's going to hurt a little.
The trick with this I’ve found is to wallow, accept, and move onto other fun things. With Instagram it's never clear why a specific post does badly, whether it's even to do with the post itself or just Instagram playing up for the numerous time.
Allow yourself to wallow in the moment if you need to, curse a little, have a casual rant to your partner or close friend and then breathe. Don't frantically study the insights whatever you do.
Accept that your latest post didn't do well for some reason or you've lost a handful of followers, accept it and don't spend too much energy stressing over why.
Move onto other fun things. Your audience is now filled with people who want to be there, those few who weren't fans have gone and you don't need them. I'm sure your brain is filled with more fun things to experiment with so focus on those ideas!
Not everyone's perfect, the amount of time you spend in each stage depends on the person and the thing they're getting through. Of course this doesn't just work with social media disheartenments but that's what we're focusing on. Be sure to follow me on Instagram if you want to get my fun art updates 🙂
- Sophie
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