Submitted 1 year ago by small44@lemmy.world to [deleted]
I understand that many people are spamming to promote, and that’s not okay. However, it’s possible to create dedicated threads or posts on social media every week for people to promote their websites, services, art, or anything else
why would they give you an ad space for free if they could charge for it. dog eats dog world
It’s called the Attention Economy. Getting peoples attention is so important today that it’s seen as a commodity to be bought and sold. You’re question is equivalent to asking why it’s so hard to find gold.
It makes it easier IMO, have you tried self promoting IRL? It’s a lot harder than on the Internet.
I’m guessing OP means it’s harder now than before the corporate siloing of the social web, not harder than handing out business cards on the street.
It’s not, though. If anything that makes it easier to gain a following.
Did you have a question or are you informing us that we can use the internet to promote our projects?
That’s really not true at all. For many artists social media is the only or best way to gather a following and advertise their products.
It takes a ton of hard work to build that following since the art market is heavily saturated, especially post-covid, but social media is the best tool for the job.
I think it’s because the Internet is paid for in large part by self promotion via ads, so free self promotion is discouraged in favor of paid self promotion.
The problem with paid ads is that people and businesses with the most money are the ones benefiting from it.
It’s pay-to-play unfortunately. Most moderated communities have regular weekly threads for self-promotion to avoid spamming the main feed. As an independent musician, I follow those rules and post only where appropriate. The other way is create your own social media artist pages, try to get as much visibility as you can, and promote from there.
Yes, it’s called running a business. Spending money on advertising is a requirement if you want to start one.
It doesn’t take much money if your work is good, though. My wife is a tattoo artist and she built up her following in just 1 year to the point where she’s booked out 2 months, and she only promoted posts for $20 or so here and there.
Self promotion isn’t an easy thing to do, so I’d suggest reading some how-to articles about how to grow your Instagram following. It requires a lot of work, to the point where managing your social media is a very large part of the job.
At the beginning my wife spent about 75% of her time on social media, while the other apprentice didn’t. Now the other apprentice struggles to have more than a few appointments a week.
The internet makes it supper easy for people to self promote. The problem is that everyone can self promote, and all of that self promotion turns into noise.
Communities and social media are sick of millions of people trying to promote themselves and have been for years, so they limit promotion. Some sites and communities have dedicated self promotion spaces, others ask you for a small fee to promote yourself through ads.
You can start r/selfpromotion or a dedicated Lemmy server on selfpromotion.space, but you won’t find an audience there.
You can easily self promote in online communities by posting relevant original content and adding a link below that. The you’ll just need to be lucky for your posts to gain popularity so you stand out from the millions of others trying to do the same.
Imagine what promoting your work was like back before the internet. You could probably get the neighbourhood to notice your work by talking to people, but you’ll ever reach anyone outside your general area without paying hand over fist for advertising. The internet brought you that power for free, at the cost of also bringing that power to everyone else fighting for attention.
As an OF girl in a saturated market I feel this 😂 but thanks to capitalisation it’s hard for anyone to promote themselves, because websites and companies would rather sell time and space to advertisers rather than allow space for independent creators / artists / musicians / whoever to promote themselves. I think the internet has made it simultaneously easier and harder for unknown artists etc to show the world what they’ve got. The barrier to get yourself out there is much lower (just make some social media pages and upload your stuff) but the barrier to actually be seen by the right people is much higher (find the right hashtags, somehow go viral, stroke of luck?) and while you want to connect with the right people you’re also cautious of being too spammy. Not sure what the answer is as it depends on what you’re trying to promote, but I personally am much happier to be “advertised to” by independent creators, artists than I am by billion dollar companies or someone who wants me to drink their weight loss shakes
I tried before to put posts about new music on instagram and i can tell you that hashtags are completely useless they only attract bots and scammers
Title talks about “the internet”, your text talks about “social media” - and threads so seemingly a subset of social media.
The internet doesn’t make it hard. It’s incredibly easy. Sending emails is easy. Hosting a website is easy. Posting to platforms is easy.
Platforms and communities restrict - through their own rules - what they deem acceptable within their own scope. That’s more about defining scope than “making it hard”.
Reasonable self promotion is often accepted on reddit and lemmy. Blatant advertising is not. Be part of the community, or run an ad for an ad. Be a good participant rather than a spammer.
Make a sublemmy for your stuff; people who are interested will follow it.
Make highlights on insta containing your various projects.
It’s not about the promotion, it’s about how and where it’s done.
Good luck getting visibility on instagram “It’s not about promotion, it’s about how and where it’s done” I agree with that, that’s why i said self promotion shouldn’t transform to spam. With a post created by the admin where people promote their stuff in comments you can avoid self promotion dominating the feed
Ya but that ain't 'viral'
It is really easy to self promote. The problem is that it is easy for everyone else to self promote as well.
Big banks hate little banks
Lets combine our forces. I just released an indie rules-light TTRPG called "Creative Card Chaos". Do you have an indie podcast or you interview people on Twitch? Invite me, so we can talk! Its content for you and promotion for me :)
Nighed@sffa.community 1 year ago
The quality of things being self promoted will on average be lower than that of content being posted by other people. (If your posting other people’s content, it’s because you think it’s good, if you are posting yours it’s just because you made it)
This isn’t necessarily a problem, in a small community it adds content and helps the poster grow their skills. But in a larger community it can result in a lot of low quality content.
small44@lemmy.world 1 year ago
In case of art it’s very subjective. Also if you create a dedicated post on social media like i mentionned bad quality self-promotion won’t leave the post and will be easy to avoid, just don’t open the post