Here’s why it’s better to build your audience via email instead of social media
Delete your Facebook: Start a Mailchimp, Substack or Medium account.
TL;DR: I switched out Social Media for direct subscription-based inbox distribution of my work and it has yielded way more than social ever did. + it won’t ever be shadow-banned by a buggy algorithm that doesn’t understand satire.
I joined Twitter about 9 months after it started. It was 2006, and I was working out of my Perth studio when I got an email invite to join the new app from a friend working at a startup in San Francisco. It all sounded very exciting.
I’d heard about the website from a podcast I’d been listening to called?This Week in Tech?with Leo Laporte, who was decrying how dumb an idea it was of ‘tweeting’ what you’re eating for breakfast. He couldn’t see the point in microblogging in 140 characters (the limit at the time) and said it was a terrible business model.
It was a browser-only application (smartphones were on the cusp of being invented) so I tried it for about 6 months. Due to the fact that it was mainly tech people in the US talking about esoteric startup jargon, I decided to go back to my?MySpace?page where I was hearing about this cool new thing called?Friendster.
Fast forward 14 years: Twitter is now one of the most influential platforms of what was eventually coined ‘social media’.
Alongside Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, LinkedIn and a litany of other platforms, the social media boom has transformed the way people discover, absorb and share information, art, music, news, and everything in-between. An unmistakable game-changer socially, professionally and technologically.
Working in daily newspapers, I could see the writing on the wall when the GFC rapidly accelerated the crippling of news companies who had failed to see social media as anything other than ‘a passing fad’. The print newspaper industry rapidly collapsed on itself,?and I figured I’d better get back onto that?Twitter?thing quick smart if I wanted any chance at remaining gainfully employed into the next decade… and while I’m at it, I should really start getting into?Facebook,?Vine, Instagram, Snapchat?etc. etc.
It was for that reason that I spent an embarrassing amount of time in the 2010’s hunched over my phone trying to gain followers on all platforms, post stories of every waking moment that could be vaguely novel, and generally living life through the prism of moments that could be captured and curated.?Caring about what others think?was the number #1 order of the day, next to?‘keeping up with what everyone else was doing’.
I got verified on Twitter, on Facebook, I collected blue ticks like it was nobody’s business. It became a new status symbol to have a certain number of followers, and I was all in on the game. I had cartoons go viral (credited and uncredited) and was exhilarated by the idea of becoming the next?Oatmeal,?XKCD?or?Hark, A Vagrant!
I attended the 2011?NCS?Reuben Awards weekend in Boston and saw Kate Beaton, Randall Monroe and Dave Kellett talk about webcomics and the general life of a cartoonist who had much of their audience find and engage with them through social media. In 2014, I was mesmerized by Kellett’s excellent documentary “Stripped” and what it meant for traditionally syndicated comic artists going online.
All the while, the algorithms in these platforms which were now in the palm of our hands were figuring out how to?game attention?for maximum ‘engagement’ in order to get a bigger return on advertising revenue. Every business model that relies on advertising revenue requires this kind of algorithmic attention hacking. There is no hope that it will change if advertising and eyeballs remain the driver of revenue. Subscription models are one of the few proven methods of avoiding this kind of algorithmic toxicity. I certainly copped more than my fair share of online bile over the years in response to various cartoons.
When I?wrote about the insidiousness of building FOMO into the DNA of Social Media platforms?back in 2013, I received a lot of curious feedback from people wondering what the hell I was talking about. It still felt like a friendly place for like-minded people to hang out and share memes.
Back then, the algorithm wasn’t as finely tuned for outrage as it was today.?The foundations of these companies?— which are run by a handful of white guys my age in one city — are laced with the innate knowledge that the?Online Disinhibition Effect?brings out the ugliest of human nature, whether they care to?admit it publicly?or not. When it is unleashed en masse, we get the divisive miasma we’re faced with today.
The algorithm is now perfectly gamed for outrage. Enragement = engagement. (= revenue). It rewards the?Man With A Hammer Tendency?more than cogent, nuanced writing, art or conversation. This is not a good place to spend your time.
? Copyright 2018, Dooley & Chatfield
This isn’t some kind of radical secret. Obviously many like?Tristan Harris?and?Jaron Lanier?have been going on about this for a long time now. Lanier’s book,?Ten Arguments to Delete Your Social Media Account Right Now?was something I read when it came out. I subsequently did absolutely nothing to delete my social media presence, such was my hopeless addiction.
Sidenote: For those interested in Jaron Lanier, he wrote an even better book in 2010 called “You Are Not a Gadget” which, while it can go off in tangents about music production and esoteric topics at times, is a valuable book even 11 years after its publication.
This year I closed my social media accounts.
My Twitter, my Instagram, my Facebook. I may look back on this post in 10 years and guffaw with the same eye-roll a post titled “I threw out my television” got in 2015, but here we are. It took me longer than it should have, but there was a multitude of reasons, not the least of which being that I had a book and other big releases to promote. #Humblebrag
? Copyright 2018, Dooley & Chatfield
Every argument I had for keeping my social media accounts were linked to my ‘career’
I had created WhatsApp groups for keeping in touch with my family and close friends, so the argument for remaining on social media to keep them ‘up-to-date’ was already out the window. The main arguments I was convinced were pertinent were:
? I?needed?exposure.
? I?needed?to engage with people to find my audience:
? to gain a following and to build an ‘identity’.
? to sell myself and my work to publishers and media brands, I’d need to show an active social media presence*.
? I?needed?to network with other like-minded professionals in my industry.
? I?needed?to show what I was doing, so people knew I was working (in comedy and in art).
Needless to say, after leaving social media, not one of these concerns has been validated.
*This one still applies for many authors, artists, journalists, actors, comedians and media workers: some who departed social media have had to reactivate their accounts in order to land a book deal or similar contract. It is a sad state of the world that publishers no longer go off the quality of the work alone. Their marketing departments rely on you plugging your book on social media more than anything else.
? Copyright 2018 Chatfield
Did it ever yield a profit?
Once I’d invested a ridiculous amount of time, energy and attention into accruing a sizeable following, I started getting offers to promote brands on my channels. I received paid endorsements from companies and had free goods sent to me to plug on my stories. It was all becoming a bit icky when brands I really didn’t like started to badger me for not endorsing?their?products. The money made on endorsements didn’t even come close to being a reasonable return on the time invested.
Among the slew of insidious features I was blindly swimming along with was that of blindly following?trends?in cartooning: one surefire way of drowning your creativity.
I saw what was getting the most likes with other artists and made the erroneous assumption that if I just posted the same kinds of things I’d get the same kinds of attention. Spoiler alert: It just doesn’t work.
If there’s one piece of advice I can give any artist still willing to stay on social media to try and get their work noticed, it’s this:
The missing link that is often overlooked with that ‘popular content’ is that it’s being created by distinct artists with a unique voice. Doing stuff that doesn’t fit your ‘artistic voice’ is like doing an entire comedy act based on impersonating other comedians. Only Gemma Correll can do?Gemma Correll. Only Liana Finck can do?Liana Finck.?When you try to mimic it, you bring nothing unique to the table, and worst of all you suppress your?own?unique voice in the process.
I’ve seen many an artist become resentful of other artists’ success on various platforms — in comedy and cartooning — and it serves no purpose. It’s ugly, and it distracts them from what they ought to be focusing on: their?own?work.
The shift
Years flew by for me on social media. I shudder to think where the time went. During the pandemic I watched the world fall apart through the lens of my phone. Among the madness, I started noticing other cartoonists I knew vanishing from my radar on social media. Curious as to what was happening (and worried they were sick), I checked in with them.
More than a few of them with big followings reported that they were fine, but they used to be getting in the neighbourhood of 7,000–10,000 likes per post. Then after one or two posts that inexplicably got less than 100 likes, their work appeared to be suppressed by the algorithm.
They experimented with using different words in their captions, hashtags and images themselves, and later learned that they had been?shadow banned.
What the hell is shadow banning?
Shadow banning, also called?stealth banning,?ghost banning?or?comment ghosting,[1]?is the practice of?blocking?or partially blocking a?user?or their content from an?online community?so that it will not be readily apparent to the user that they have been banned.?(Source: Wikipedia)
In the wake of the?“social experiment none of us really signed up for”, platforms are now scrambling to manage the fallout of this ugly side of humanity. As they rapidly curtail the fallout from the volatile shit-storm they’ve crafted, they are tripping over their own feet and up-ending the careers of their users.
The sheer volume of bile means human workers can’t possibly do it all manually, so they’ve employed an increasingly complex AI to automate the delicate process of moderating their platforms.
? Copyright 2018, Dooley & Chatfield
It has not gone well.
Instagram and Facebook in particular had more than a few egregious cases of mistakenly shadow banning several creators for parodying or discussing political hot topics in their work. Topical gag cartoonists and political cartoonists, in particular, were having the worst trouble with it.
The nature of their work means they need to discuss these topics whether they’re palatable to the algorithm or not.
I attended the American Association of Editorial Cartoonists’ convention in Columbus, OH in 2019 where cartoonists were discussing this a lot. Not only were cartoonists?being fired for drawing anti-Trump cartoons, but they had to simultaneously contend with the various vague rules and regulations on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram that governed what was and wasn’t ‘hate speech’, ‘encouraging violence’ or ‘peddling disinformation’.
Matt Bors, the Editor of?the Nib, did a presentation on their early success and challenges using Medium.com as a platform and distributing their work through social media. Today, they still rely about 60%* on Facebook and Instagram to share their work with their audience. (They send out a regular email blast also, but I have no idea what those numbers look like these days.)
Their main income is from paid memberships, but the people who subscribe are discovering them through social media… which keeps removing their cartoons because the algorithm’s AI doesn’t recognise irony. A maddening conundrum.
*Article with data above features The Nib editor, Matt Bors and Political Cartoonist Adam Zyglis
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From the New York Times:
One?cartoon?in December took aim at the?Proud Boys, a far-right extremist group. With tongue planted firmly in cheek, Mr. Bors titled it “Boys Will Be Boys” and depicted a recruitment where new Proud Boys were trained to be “stabby guys” and to “yell slurs at teenagers” while playing video games.
Days later, Facebook sent Mr. Bors a message saying that it had removed “Boys Will Be Boys” from his Facebook page for “advocating violence” and that he was on probation for violating its content policies.
It wasn’t the first time that Facebook had dinged him. Last year, the company briefly took down another Nib cartoon — an ironic critique of former President Donald J. Trump’s pandemic response, the substance of which supported wearing masks in public — for “spreading misinformation” about the coronavirus. Instagram, which Facebook owns,?removed?one of his sardonic antiviolence cartoons in 2019 because, the photo-sharing app said, it promoted violence.
—
Adam Zyglis, a nationally syndicated political cartoonist for The Buffalo News, was also caught in Facebook’s cross hairs.
After the storming of the Capitol in January, Mr. Zyglis drew a cartoon of Mr. Trump’s face on a sow’s body, with a number of Mr. Trump’s “supporters” shown as piglets wearing MAGA hats and carrying Confederate flags. The cartoon was a condemnation of how Mr. Trump had fed his supporters violent speech and hateful messaging, Mr. Zyglis said.
Facebook removed the cartoon for promoting violence. Mr. Zyglis guessed that was because one of the flags in the comic included the phrase “Hang Mike Pence,” which Mr. Trump’s supporters had chanted about the vice president during the riot. Another supporter piglet carried a noose, an item that was also present at the event.
“Those of us speaking truth to power are being caught in the net intended to capture hate speech,” Mr. Zyglis said.
It seems not a week goes by when I don’t read about yet another cartoonist having their work blocked by Twitter, Facebook, Instagram or elsewhere. The problem is not getting better.
Well, it all sounds very doom and gloom. What’s the alternative?
At that very same 2019 conference in Columbus, I spoke to a political cartoonist named?Nick Anderson?about a new venture on which these newly-fired or censored cartoonists were finding a platform but, with an important key element: it wasn’t just for left-leaning cartoonists who were out of a job; it was for cartoonists on both sides of politics,?and?it wasn’t published on a website.
It was an emailed newsletter with cartoons on the news of the day from Left-leaning cartoonists AND from Right-leaning cartoonists. It enabled the now-divided audiences to see what the other side was saying. The confirmation-bias bubbles created by social media meant they barely knew what the other side’s perspective was, let alone seeing any content in their feeds about it.
The newsletter was aptly named?Counterpoint.
When I spoke to Nick back then, the newsletter was only new. He told me the impressive numbers week-to-week from just sending it to friends and family to the exponential booming growth as it was shared far and wide.
Today it is hosted on?Substack?with a subscription model, hosts work by Pulitzer prize-winning cartoonists, and by all accounts is doing very well.
Could the humble inbox be the new (old) frontier in reaching readers?
It isn’t a particularly?new?idea. Subscribing to mail merges, lists and newsletters has been around since the early days of the internet, but in the face of the challenges of cartoonists reaching readers on social media, this distribution model does two distinct things:
1. It shows up in a place that feels a bit more personal than a social media platform. For some generations, their inbox still feels like something private that they get to curate, and visit several times a day. (Whether they like it or not).
2. It gives you full control of your audience, no matter what algorithms change. Yes, open rates vary depending on spam filters, newsletter content and double opt-in mechanics, not to mention the length and size of your emails, but those emails will always be in your control:
Your subscribers’ emails can’t be pulled from you at a moment’s notice by a botched algorithm. You can also port them over to a number of different platforms like Mailchimp or Substack if you want.
People can unsubscribe in the way they can unfollow someone on social media, but those who stay tend to be more engaged and more ‘loyal’ to your work than people casually scrolling through a feed. And yes, there are ways to stay out of their Spam folder.
The ‘Weekly Chatfield’ experiment:
Every Tuesday for the past 5 years, I’ve sent out?an email with a free cartoon, illustration, comic story, or all three.
Once in a while, I’ll plug a cartoon print or a pair of socks, but mainly I work to the principle of “Give more than you get.” and just send the cartoon and a weekly photo of my dog. (Jury’s out on which image is more popular.)
Over the years, I’ve developed a genuine connection with the readers of my cartoons who reply to my weekly emails. I’ve learned a lot about their lives in every part of the world. It’s a connection I genuinely value, as opposed to the comments that would appear under any given cartoon, and when I send out my once-a-year “Share this newsletter with a friend” request, the number of new subscribers nearly doubles.
I now?exclusively?use?Mailchimp?to share my work with my readers.?(I’m exploring Substack as an alternative… watch this space)
Finding your Rat People
Some years ago, Paul Jarvis wrote a short essay entitled,?Find Your Rat People.?It really struck a chord with me on many levels.
Paul is something of a newsletter genius. He teaches an online course on Mailchimp called?ChimpEssentials?that I recommend. His book?Company of One?is the perfect pairing.
In the book, Jarvis details the benefit of finding your niche (your ‘rat people’) and catering to those who actually engage with you, instead of racing for an endless pursuit of ‘more followers’.
Click to purchase book.?(This is not a paid endorsement or affiliate link: I’m not associated with Jarvis or getting any kickbacks.)
Seth Godin calls it the?“Minimum Viable Audience.”?The author Danielle LaPorte refers to it as “Feeding only those who show up to dinner”. It isn’t a particularly groundbreaking concept, but the central tenet of all of this is to find your ‘enough’.
If your?enough?is finally landing at your?1000 True fans?and then creating happily for them for the rest of your days, then that is a very rational, reasonable pursuit. Trying to become stratospherically famous on TikTok might not be the best way to do that. Just ask anyone who was famous on?Vine.
I interviewed?Tom Fishburne?(below) in 2020 for?NCSFest?about this approach of building your audience and his enormous success in his execution of marketing to his niche. In his case it was cartoons?about?Marketing. (Tom also happens to have been featured in an early chapter of?Company of One.)
I had the opportunity to look over the syllabus of a cartooning course for young artists recently and couldn’t help but notice the inevitable importance placed on using social media to get noticed, to get work, to network with other artists and art directors and other ways of getting a foot in the door.
Would I recommend investing time in social media accounts for a young artist just starting out? I honestly don’t know. The industry right now is in such a state of flux that any answer I give will be proven right or wrong in a week.
What I?would?recommend is putting more focus on your actual work.?That means draw more than you share.?Not every drawing needs to be shared with the world if it isn’t a good representation of your ability. You may also be deterred by the response (or lack thereof) when you post your work publicly, so be wary of the ability of social media to affect your mental health and creative process. I could speak more on this, but perhaps that’s for another post.
Lastly…
Last month I noticed this popup when visiting?“The Oatmeal”: the wildly popular webcomic. It appears?Matthew Inman?has now changed his policy on relying on social media to reach his fans. These algorithmic hiccups are just too damaging to a creator’s ability to reach their audience, so they are looking to other, more reliable means of doing so.
Is email the solution then?
Almost certainly not. Email newsletters are not a solve-all for the ills of social media. They are, however, a good solution?right now.
Along with closed subscription-based groups on platforms like?Circle.so, these opt-in groups give you more of a chance to actually share your work and communicate with a like-minded community than the comments section of Facebook.
I have a friend, a best-selling author who has started up a reader group on circle.so for her community of fans after very wisely leaving social media some time ago. I have to admit, I’ve never seen a more supportive and civil comments section in my life. It really is worth exploring if you have a vocal and engaged fanbase who want to communicate with each other.
The reason I don’t proselytize “email” as the solve-all is that many in younger generations despise email and can’t believe how outdated it is. They prefer instead to use iMessage, WhatsApp, Slack, GoogleDocs and other platforms to communicate. There is definitely a generational difference in the majority of people signing up to my newsletter, and it isn’t young people (the exception is fellow artists who happen to be on the younger side).
I read Cal Newport’s latest book “A World Without Email” earlier this year and found myself nodding along with many of the insights and pain points of email: how it is now tethering us all to our desks and making us miserable. He does have some good points about culture change needed in the workplace to ensure email doesn’t bury people in shallow work. (His other book “Deep Work” is brilliant.) It is, however, only one piece of the puzzle when it comes to finding ways to use it?well.
He wrote the article below for the?New Yorker?recently which can fill in the blanks on the book for you.
The nature of this argument probably means I’ll continue to add to this article as the times evolve, but this is where my thoughts have landed as of July of 2021. Who the hell knows what happens next…
System Brain Who Works with ActiveCampaign, Keap, Hubspot and More
3 年I'm with you on this, although I do think social media can be used to direct interest to sign up for your email. When choosing an email platform, what is most important to you?
I make complex things simple & boring things interesting ?? Creative Catalyst, Visual Facilitator & Brand Specialist for Innovation & Tech, Speaker, Semiotician, New Yorker Cartoonist
3 年Social media definitely does not have a sense of humor!