Hey, so.
I understand that this is anecdotal and not research, but.
It is WILD how useless social media has become for promo. It's a fucking disgrace, really.
Kids just getting started trying to be independent artists will never experience or understand what a real "grass roots" support network on Twitter or whatever can be like.
I've mentioned this before but early Kickstarters I ran? 1/3rd of the funding was from Twitter.
When Twitter was useful and humming along, I used to say (re: being an independent creative online) "It's never gonna be easy, but it's never been easier."
And it fucking kills me to consider that THAT may have been the high water mark. That we've SEEN as good as it gets for us.
When you run a store or a BackerKit, you can see all the analytics. Where people come from. It can get really granular.
We launched the Lackadaisy store rebuild a few hours ago, and sales are humming along, and.
Twitter isn't even in the top 5 referrers.
Unthinkable, 5 years ago.
In a purely bloodless, bottom-line sense, nuking the Iron Circus Twitter of +20k followers would make no appreciable difference to our results. Zero!
How the fuck did it all rot away this quickly?
...I mean, I know the partial answer, we all do. But still.
I mean, the way I see it, when one story ends, another begins. Twitter may be gone, however, we have other sites like this, Cara, Pixiv, Newgrounds, & others. It’s not the end. Y’all remember MySpace?
the problem is that no one uses these platforms. the general public has not flocked to better pastures, they've just stopped using social media. only the most online of people looked for new places for posts as the old socmed giants began to crumble
From the consumer side like, I don’t even know where to look at this point.
Twitter was so good to see creators promoting things I wanted to see, and not just the algorithm.
This is my situation. I followed a couple people here but I don't know where the others went (or they went to Threads and, I'm sorry, but FB can go f*** itself).
Instagram is an algorithm-driven cesspool, mastodon is low uptake, FB is just... yeah..., and I choose obsolescence over Snap and TikTok.
Yeah, it's become wildly unpredictable where to find what you want.
-Instagram- is better at recommending me musicians I'll like than YouTube?! Meanwhile I'm better off finding BOOKS and art analysis on YouTube?? None of this makes sense.
Since I live on the opposite side of the earth as most of my readers, it can be rough but I can do morning visits by staying up a little late and evening visits by getting up a little early. School visits often happen in the afternoon though, and that means setting an alarm for like 3am my time.
Jibes with the numbers I've seen with brands I work with. Twitter flat-out died hard and never recovered. It was shocking how it literally went *poof*.
So far I haven't seen a real leader in exposure for indy artists and creators outside of niches. But then, all marketing is niche.
Same. I had a high water mark over there of nearly 9k when I was verified in the old version. I'm down to 7.5k-ish now, and I'm pretty sure 90% of those are people who just kept the account to prevent impersonation. That's the only reason I kept mine. Building a business now (a bookstore) is HARD.
Soon as Captain Moron took over my Twitter account went from our #1 source of clicks and money for our KS campaigns for yeaaaaaars to barely cracking the top 10
What are your top 3 now? Do they change much? And would you consider those substantial or just the best of a fractured online experience?
(Sorry to pepper with questions.)
Bluesky barely makes half the website referrer traffic of twitter and I haven't posted there in 10 months.
June 2023: 776 visitors/4200 views.
June 2024: 135 visitors/680 views
Orders are down 90%. Sales down 70%.
that's interesting - I recall news orgs saying that despite spending so much time there, the majority of their traffic came from FB. Different audiences I guess
Im a painter, and I look back at just a couple of years ago when strangers would buy paintings from me directly from instagram. But that site is so crammed now with ads and fakery that it’s all but useless for self-promotion
I took a long break from insta bc the way to grow there was too much for me (daily posting, multiple times a day, so on) and the same on Twitter. I finally started growing on Twitter and it crashed hard and I still can't recover. It's a struggle rn.
Agreed. During peak Twitter years, I found SO MANY new writing jobs/opportunities via professional social media networking (I also made some wonderful friends).
Guess those years are gone.
Yep ... the reason I've turned off my graphic novel output and reverted solely to the written word. At least with the written word, I'm not bleeding cash while trying to get people to look at my work, and there just doesn't seem to be a way to get eyeballs anymore.
