Roald Dahl doesn’t have an Instagram account. He passed away in 1990. But there are over 300,000 posts tagged #roalddahl and the ‘official HQ account’ on Instagram has over 57,000 followers.
Managing social media, along with all the other stuff I have to do in life, is hard. It’s a time-suck. The algorithms that drive visibility demand us to be sharing high-quality content, 3 times a day, 7 days a week. And they aren’t designed for us, they’re designed to benefit the ones who pay: the advertisers. Who’s got time for that when the alternative is to write the next book?
Sure, there are tools that ‘automate’ the process for us. They say things, “post like a pro”. But they don’t really automate it. We still need to capture, curate, and, at the very least, schedule the content. Some ‘professionals’ advise that we “do it in batches” or “schedule several weeks in advance” to try to reduce the overwhelm. Which is fine, but it still takes away from doing the work.
Maybe another approach is to just make great work, like Roald Dahl did. If we strive to make great work, work that matters, work that can’t be ignored, then we don’t need to share it on social media, because if it’s good enough, others will. We’ll have a lot more fun along the way, too.