How do I use social media?

[bulevardi]

Social media is curated and creates a new reality. It's not the reality that's good for you.

I can see some similarities with porn. Most of it creates another reality too.
Both work on your brain and produce dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, ...
Both can work compulsive and addictive.

What bothers me on IG is that every 2 posts I see an advertisement or promoted post.
I see too much influencers posting zillions of times video content about their superficial lives, videos about how they prepare their next video, unboxing the stuff they buy, ... If you go offline for 6 months and come back, you see them post exactly the same things.

I forgot to mention "junk".
I see similarities with junk food.
And hyperprocessed foods aswel, created to satisfy quickly but without a sufficient amount of nutritional values. It's fast digesting and you'll get hungry soon after.

Much of social media content is junk, low quality, fast consumed information, carousels of 30 second videos, as the brains will get rewired to a short focus span when using social media for a while.

[lwj]

Social media? No thanks, I have a job.

[recmix]

be prepared to spend a LOT of time following, commenting, etc. on other people's accounts if you want to get anything in return

Do you think that engaging with others on other's accounts is the secret sauce in getting the numbers up? I was under the impression (perhaps a wrong one) that quality content and posting daily is what makes it or breaks it. Speaking for non-music related account.

[cryophonik]

be prepared to spend a LOT of time following, commenting, etc. on other people's accounts if you want to get anything in return

Do you think that engaging with others on other's accounts is the secret sauce in getting the numbers up? I was under the impression (perhaps a wrong one) that quality content and posting daily is what makes it or breaks it. Speaking for non-music related account.

Honestly, I’m not sure anymore. We gained most of our followers back when IG was much more active, before they changed the algorithm a thousand times, and before the previously mentioned “tiktokification” took place. I stopped caring and rarely post anymore, and I hardly follow anybody new these days. In the meantime, we’ve gone from getting thousands of likes for every post to getting maybe 100 likes if we’re lucky, and we’ve dropped from 70K followers to 57K over the past few years. All this is to say that I’ve stopped caring about trying to keep up with IG’s algorithm changes, their insistence on filling my feed with suggestions, ads, and posts that I don’t care about while hiding posts that I do care about, etc. They’ve killed off the engagement and most of the photographers and models that I’ve known for years have pretty much given up on it as a result.

[enroe]

... In the meantime, we’ve gone from getting thousands of likes for every post to getting maybe 100 likes if we’re lucky, and we’ve dropped from 70K followers to 57K over the past few years ...

Do you feel that these likes and followers really helped spread and
promote your music? And that you therefore had, or still have, a
real fan base?

Or is it perhaps the case that you created a lot of talk and gossip
content - but your music wasn't really in the foreground?

[cryophonik]

... In the meantime, we’ve gone from getting thousands of likes for every post to getting maybe 100 likes if we’re lucky, and we’ve dropped from 70K followers to 57K over the past few years ...

Do you feel that these likes and followers really helped spread and
promote your music? And that you therefore had, or still have, a
real fan base?

Or is it perhaps the case that you created a lot of talk and gossip
content - but your music wasn't really in the foreground?

Sorry - to clarify, this is for our photography service, not music. And, yes it helped to promote our photography side gig tremendously and brought more clients our way than we could handle but, of course, photos is what IG was originally intended for so it makes sense. IG is really what put us on the map (our page has over 3,500 posts featuring around 300-400 different models/clients), so it definitely focused on the actual content and not talk/gossip/hype.

As for music, I had IG accounts for a few of my musical projects, but they never really got any traction mostly because IG wasn't really designed to showcase music at the time. I deleted those accounts years ago, so it would probably be a different story now that IG has a lot more features for supporting audio (including your own music). That said, I will note that many of the singers I've worked with over the past 10 years are models that I met through our photography account who could also sing/write lyrics.

[BertKoor]

[...] before the previously mentioned “tiktokification” took place.

Social media indeed turned into a load of "Whatever".
Full rant: https://eev.ee/blog/2025/07/03/the-rise-of-whatever/
(not me, could be though)

[emiko399]

Algorithms really killed the old idea of "just post and people will see it". Now it feels like unless you play the daily engagement game, reach just disappears.

I’m working with Socially Powerful right now, they run campaigns where the content itself gets pushed instead of relying on IG’s mood swings. Makes the whole thing a lot less frustrating than chasing likes all day.