THE NOT SO SUBTLE ART OF SELF PROMOTION
I’m doing a free webinar with YunoJuno on 12 March on “The Art of Self Promotion on Social Media”. So, if you ever fancied hearing my dulcet tones tell you about how to sell yourself as a freelancer, this is your chance. I can’t promise you world domination, but I can promise you Dad jokes. And really, isn’t that what we all want from a free webinar?
This may be hard to believe, but I have a really hard time with self promotion. I say “hard to believe” because, if you’ve ever met me, you will know that I don’t exactly blend into the background. I am loud. I have pink hair. I have so many tattoos, I’ve genuinely lost count of them all. I have a lot of opinions about a lot of things and I’m not afraid to share them with the class. But when it comes to shouting about my achievements, I begin to feel a bit awkward.
Perhaps this is a legacy of growing up female-presenting in the 1990s, where any scrap of self-congratulatory behaviour was seen as you getting “too big for your boots”. At school, you couldn’t say you’d aced an exam or a project. Instead, you had to shuffle your feet and mumble that you think you did OK. To do anything else would be to run the gauntlet.
I remember someone on a message board in 2000 telling me I was arrogant for saying that I was going to write for the NME someday. Looking back, it feels weird that I let a complete stranger tell me I was big headed for publicly expressing a desire, but back then it burned. I’ve always been sensitive, and at 17 I was raw and desperately trying to figure out who I was and what I wanted. When I finally got published in the NME in 2014, part of me wanted to hunt that person down and wave the article in their face, telling them they were wrong and I was right, which would have been pointless. They probably don’t even remember saying it.
And then there’s this newsletter. I started Social Lives because I was fed up logging on to social media platforms - the platforms I used every single day and made a living from - and listening to the world’s worst men confidently spew out the world’s worst advice. I was tired of only hearing male voices when the majority of people who work in social media are women. I wanted to provide a different perspective from someone who definitely doesn’t always get things right, but does know what they’re doing and is prepared to share their knowledge with others just starting in the industry. Essentially, I wanted to read something I would have valued when I first started working in social, telling me everything was going to be OK.
I’ve been writing Social Lives on-and-off for almost five years now, which is wild. It’s not the biggest social media newsletter on the planet, and that’s OK. If it got too big, I’d probably have to monetise it and that’s not something I feel comfortable doing. Plus, there’s also the self-promotion angle. For some reason, I always feel really weird about marketing Social Lives. This is ridiculous. I mean, this whole newsletter is about marketing. So why am I so bad at doing it for myself?
I wish I had an answer for that, but I don’t. I could show false humility and say that I can’t believe that people would want to read anything written by little old me. I could say that I’m lazy and can’t be arsed crafting social media posts about myself when I’ve been writing them for brands all day. I could say that I want this newsletter to be a hidden gem, only for people in the know, or that it feels wrong to make people read all about my worries about aging out of my job when there are whole families being wiped out in Gaza. In actuality, it’s a combination of all of those things.
If you’ve read all of the above and think it’s ironic that I’m doing a workshop on the Art of Self Promotion, then that makes two of us. All I can promise is that I will be great at telling you how to do it well. I just hope that I’ll remember to take my own advice and make 2024 the year we all get Social Lives.
JOBS BOARD
Contract: Blu have a role open for a Social Media Manager at a food and drink brand on a 12 month FTC
Freelance: Buttermilk are looking for a freelance Paid Social Media Manager
Full Time: ITV need a Marketing Manager for the Coronation Street and Emmerdale Tours
Freelance: Sumo are recruiting a freelance Influencer Campaign Manager
Full Time: Netflix require a Social Media Campaign Manager
IMPORTANT THING OF THE WEEK: OPERATION OLIVE BRANCH
I spent quite a lot of time on Sunday night/Monday morning watching Rafah - an area the size of Heathrow Airport - being bombed and feeling totally useless. It’s too easy to watch the news and get bogged down by despair, thinking that there’s nothing you can do to ease so much suffering.
But, here’s one thing you can do here and now. If you’ve got spare money and want to do something useful with it, Operation Olive Branch have created a spreadsheet of GoFundMe’s for families trying to leave Gaza. It may feel like a small gesture, but it can make a world of difference to people just trying to survive.
IN THE NEWS
Bluesky’s CEO says full hashtag support is coming (The Verge)
Instagram is testing carousels within Reels that will let users feature multiple still images and/or videos in a single post (Social Media Today)
Instagram is also (allegedly) testing new limits on how many hashtags you can add to your posts (Social Media Today)
Meta will make advertisers cover Apple's 30 percent fee on boosted Facebook and Instagram posts (Engadget)
THINGS I LIKE
The text file that runs the internet (The Verge)
The beauty and freedom of black punks (Harpers Bazaar)
The Endless Thread podcast discusses TikTok’s ‘Tunnel Girl’ (WBUR)
I love the look of this Lemon and Black Sesame Loaf Cake. Plus, it’s vegan! (The Guardian)
A GOOD TIKTOK
“Sometimes the breakdancing life calls for you, who am I to tell you not to pick up the phone.”