Updating my social media

I've been purging this week. With the changes happening on Meta, etc. I decided it was time to assess what platforms were actually useful to me as an artist.

What I was looking for on social media was engagement; promoting my services when I was a Make-Up Artist, and later my work as an Artist and Maker. Taking a hard look at what I was actually getting was really disappointing. 

I'd deleted myself from Twitter before the sale to you know who finalized. I hadn't figured it out so no loss.

The impetus to do something about the rest of it came with Meta's changes about "free speech" and getting rid of the fact-checkers. Not to mention AI.

I had almost 1,800 followers on my FB business page... and only four of them ever engaged with me - liking or commenting on posts, etc. So I had to ask myself - why am I bothering? I started by deleting all my photos/albums, personal info (not that I had a lot) and putting a notice in my header about it. Later, deleted it. Still have my personal profile there for now, set to Friends Only, as that's how I currently stay in touch. But even with that, I'm removing old posts and photos as things come up in the Memory feed.

The weird thing is, doing that made me want to get rid of more!

I deleted my Pinterest account yesterday... it was the thing to have at one point, but I didn't use myself as if I wanted to keep a link I bookmarked it. I was posting things to share with others in categories I was interested in - like Low Carb recipes. Again, there was no engagement, and I rarely even opened it.

Next was LinkedIn. Again, never actually did anything for me. I had some interaction with people I knew, occasionally, but all I posted there was links to my blog. I tried to delete it - but couldn't as it was attached to LinkedIn Learning through my university - how? Don't know. I deleted all my contacts, personal details, information and images leaving a vacant unnamed account. I'll deal with removing it later.

I then turned my sights on Instagram. I'd set-up in early 2020. Appeared it would be a good space to have a gallery of my work. Looked nice to see it all laid out in that format. During lockdown there were tons of "follow back" feeds and I participated in a few. Followers got up to just under 2,000... briefly. There was a bit of a surge of engagement - the highest number of likes on a single image was 102 in mid-2020. 

In August 2023 I had 974 followers and I was following 1,847. At that point I started to check what was coming up in my feed, as I had ended up following people who I wasn't all that interested in. I was also checking the list of accounts I followed.  I would check to see if they were following me, if not, and I wasn't interested for whatever reason, I would unfollow. 

Over the last two years, I eventually weeded it down to me following 940 accounts, and having 932 followers. But, same as the other socials, there are only a certain number of them who engage. After that surge during lockdown, I would be lucky to have 20 hits on an image. Certainly didn't gain any work or sales from it. I was still liking artists who I was interested in, but they also are in other places that I can access.

I started deleting my work from IG in stages. And for the artists that I still wanted to follow, I bookmarked their websites and/or subscribed to their YouTube channel. I had intended to just leave my current body of work up as most of my MA cohorts and I shared work. But... last night decided I can use other platforms for that, so end result is Instagram was deleted.

What is left is, of course, my website (which turned 20 years old on January 1st!) Also, three blogs that were/are for different reasons and I'll keep them going. I plan to get more content on YouTube - which will be a huge learning curve, but now I'll have time to do it as I won't be trying to keep on top of the other socials. 

There were other sites I tried out over the years but deleted fairly quickly.

I joined BlueSky in November and am really enjoying it - lots of engagement, over 1,600 followers at the moment, I'm following 2.400 but have slowed down on that. Would be nice to have more followers than following for a change - I can dream. Art is a huge thing there right now, really great.

Luckily I've been using Linktree for a few years, so with all these changes to my socials I just have to update it quickly to be up-to-date. I did have to mess around with my webpage as I had a footer with an icons box. Not the easiest thing to change as they do not have presets for Wordpress, Blogger or Bluesky. I ended up removing that box and inserting a single "inline item" of the Linktree icon and linking that. So that's all good now. Also edited content to keep current.

https://linktr.ee/shannonfennellartist

This morning I realized that my "about" blurbs on my remaining Facebook profile and YouTube needed updating, so got that fixed today.

I feel like I've accomplished something and that's a good feeling.

Something to look at. Monoprint (gel plate). Quite like the textures and shadow/ghost imprints in it... and I forgot how I did that. Yes, I know I should be making notes, no need to remind me.