I’ve created my first Instagram account back in a day when it was still a major food porn platform. I’m more interested in eating my food not shooting photos of it and I’m not the selfie person either, so I posted mostly landscapes photos that I took during my walks. They were nor good nor interesting, they had no meaning to others. I didn’t take an extra effort to work on them to call them art. Just another public photo diary. To be fair I liked them very much, but I missed the basic concept of publishing things online.
It should be interesting to others not to me. It was the time when I cared more about likes and number of followers. Don’t worry! I care about all of you, but I don’t obsess about the numbers anymore. Back to the story – I was crushed, how can someone not love this beautiful scene?
and why my cat in a pizza box didn’t go viral?
Apart from the fact that my cat is the cutest cat in the world (said every cat owner on this planet at least few times a day) my instagram feed was average to say the least.
And what’s the best way to NOT get noticed? Be the average fish in a shoal, be just like everybody else. You’ll be invisible. I wanted the opposite, thing is the photography wasn’t really my thing. I didn’t have time to get better at it. I work in web design business and I think we all can agree, websites are not very sexy topic for instagram (unless they are about food;)). There are just few people who can pull a web design screen shots on instagram and go away with it, and I’m not one of them.
I knew I can utilize Instagram to my professional benefit but I needed to figure out how. I was working a lot and didn’t expect that project management will eat away 60% of my time. I started to feel overworked and burned out. I needed some creative outlet that’s not related directly to my daily work.
I started to create daily (phew! That’s an overstatement) doodles and posted them on instagram. I didn’t have my own unique style. I was trying things out, without any strings attached. Some of those doodles were good, others were complete disaster, bu the important part is, I was drawing. Something I always wanted to do but didn’t think I had the talent for (that’s why practice beats talent). Finally, the instagram was the perfect place to post this daily *cough* liar *cough cough* doodles.
At the same time I realized that maybe I’m not the only one that don’t post food porn on instagram. That’s how I found:
I was blown away. Apart from awesome artworks on these feeds there is one thing that those accounts have in common – consistency.
Imagine you have 5 diamonds and a 500 glass beads, when you put them into the same bag you won’t see or even find the diamonds. You need to let go of things that don’t mean much to you and don’t have any value to others. I know that social media can be selfish, but if you create for the audience you need to forget about yourself for a while and find out what your audience like, care or will talk about.
Time is the only thing in this world that you can’t get more (unless you double it:P) it’s non-renewable resource. Don’t waste it posting things that are not meaningful. Curate your feed and your audience will thank you. The bottom line is: If you do something that hundreds of others do, at least let your best work shine, don’t bury it between food photos and selfies.
When you are starting up artist and you do want to get some attention on Instagram here are few tips that worked for me:
Good luck and have a lovely day!
Agata
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