If nobody’s seeing your posts, give them somewhere else to find you

I was looking at the analytics for one of my recent Pretty Way Walks videos about Toy Story, and something jumped out at me.

Only 16.8% of the people who saw it were already following me, which means 83.2% weren’t.

On the surface, that’s brilliant. My video is being shown to people who’ve never come across me before, which is exactly what we’re all told we want from social media. We want to reach new people and hopefully have some of them stick around.

But then I thought about who those people actually are. They don’t know me yet, and I like to talk!

My videos aren’t necessarily neat little seven-second snippets designed to stop a thumb mid-scroll. Sometimes they’re a minute or two and occasionally they wander towards three or four, because I’m telling a story and there’s usually somewhere I’m going with it.

If you already know me, you probably expect that. You might have watched a few of my Pretty Way Walks or read something I’ve written, so you know there’s usually a dot hiding in there somewhere.

If I’ve appeared randomly in your feed for the first time, though, asking you to give me four minutes of your day is quite a lot. You don’t know yet whether I’m worth four minutes.

That made me think about all the conversations we have about reach and the dreaded algorithm.

We worry that our followers aren’t seeing our posts, so we start wondering whether we should post at a different time or change what we're creating. Maybe we decide everything needs to be shorter because people apparently have the attention span of a goldfish these days.

Some of those changes might help, but perhaps we’re asking social media to do a job it was never particularly good at doing in the first place.

Social media is brilliant at the introduction

It can put you in front of someone who has never heard of you before. My 83.2% of non-followers proves that.

What it can’t guarantee is that they’ll ever see you again.

They might really enjoy something you make today and never be shown another post. They might even follow you and still barely see you, because following somebody doesn't mean every post they create will magically appear in your feed.

That’s why I keep coming back to the idea of social media being a doorway.

Someone might come across a piece of my art and find their way to my website. Someone else might watch one of my Pretty Way Walks and decide to read the longer story on my blog. Eventually, they might decide they'd quite like to hear from me again and join my email list.

Now we have a way to stay in touch that doesn't rely entirely on Instagram or Facebook deciding whether we're allowed to see each other today.

If somebody joins your email list, write to them

This is something I feel quite strongly about because I’ve signed up to plenty of email lists myself.

If I give you my email address, it’s because I want to hear from you. So let me hear from you. You don't need to write every week. You don't need a complicated content plan or an incredibly profound lesson every time you turn up in my inbox. If once a month is what works for you, write to me once a month.

Tell me what you've been doing lately. Share something you've made or something you've been thinking about. Let me get to know you a little better.

What I don't particularly love is hearing absolutely nothing for months and then suddenly getting an email because you've launched something and you'd like me to buy it. That's not much of a relationship, is it?

If the only time you remember I exist is when you want my credit card out, I'm probably not going to feel particularly connected to you.

It feels completely different when I've been hearing from you along the way. I've seen what you've been working on and I've got to know how you think. When you eventually have something to sell that might be right for me, it isn't a stranger suddenly appearing in my inbox asking for money. It's someone I already know.

Maybe we don’t need to make everything shorter

This is the bit I’ve been thinking about since seeing those analytics.

I could look at the fact that 83.2% of viewers don’t know me and decide that I need to chop all my videos down because strangers aren't going to watch me ramble for four minutes. But I don't really want to do that.

I like telling stories. I like pulling on a thread until I find the dot hiding at the end of it. Sometimes that takes longer than thirty seconds, and I'm okay with that.

It doesn't mean I can't make shorter things as well. A quick post might be the first time somebody comes across me, while a longer video gives the people who are interested a chance to get to know me properly. Then there are places like this blog where I can take an idea further without worrying about whether I've exceeded somebody's preferred reel length.

They don't all need to do the same job. I think that's the bit we sometimes forget when we're trying so hard to get social media right. We expect every post to reach people, build a relationship and somehow lead to a sale. That's an awful lot to ask from one Instagram post.

Maybe its job is simply to open the door. Then we need to make sure there's somewhere for people to go once they decide they'd quite like to know us better.

Because getting seen by new people is lovely, but I'd much rather give the right people a way to find me again.