I was watching a TikTok this morning. I like TikTok as a viewer… It was a guy who was shaving off his beard. He had a good beard… went to the barber… still had more of a beard than I’m capable of growing even after ‘shaving off’ his beard. Life isn’t fair.
Anyway.
Someone questioned him about whether he’d cut it off because he’d split up with his girlfriend. He answered the question to say he had… and “as a content creator” he felt like his followers had a right to know…
This is social media 2022, people.
But it got me thinking more deeply about something that’s been on my mind a lot lately. Are we all expected to be content creators now?
A few tiktoks later it was an artist. A painter. And the sound used on the video said something like ‘everything is content, dont forget to film it’.
I don’t want to film everything I’m doing for ‘content’.
I don’t want to be a ‘content creator’.
But at the same time I don’t want to fall out of touch or be a dinosaur who refuses to embrace change.
It’s tough. Very tough. Paralysingly tough.
I don’t know if you feel it too? It feels crippling at times, meaning I’m actually posting very little anywhere at the moment, because I can’t work out what I should actually be doing!
I see a lot of photographers at the moment posting reels from weddings they’re at. A string of short videos taken at the wedding, but none of their actual photography. I don’t want to do that.
I also see more and more photographers posting behind the scenes stuff showing how they made their more creative shots. I don’t want to do that.
Or the one that seems to get the most traction, views, likes and go the most ‘viral’ is photographers making meme reels to amuse or educate other photographers. I don’t want to do that.
I don’t get it but I understand why. More and more we’re told that if we want ANYONE to see ANY of our stuff, we should make reels and tiktoks and maybe have a YouTube channel.
At the same time we’re told Facebook and Twitter are dead. Facebook I agree, Twitter I’m not so sure. LinkedIn? YouTube? What about good old fashioned blogging and SEO?? Also dead? I’d argue maybe, but that’s for another day.
I feel like we’re at a time when everything is mid-transition. It feels impossible to know what to do, where to put your valuable time and energy when it’s also mid-crazy-season and time and energy are two things we don’t really have right now, and many things feel overwhelming.
I don’t have a solution but I’ll tell you where I stand with it all at the moment… mainly this week I’m just thinking out loud… and I definitely don’t have the answer to everything… nobody does 😉
Mid season, for me, isn’t an easy time to work on new strategies or divert time into creating stuff for marketing because like I said time and energy are being completely exhausted by shooting and editing, and having time ‘off’ to myself is more important than creating content to appeal to the so-called algorithms of social media.
I remind myself as a former marketeer that the goal of marketing (for our photography businesses) is to make us as findable as possible by potential paying clients, and make it more desirable for those prospective clients to take some action and book us. It’s about putting actual money in the actual bank, so that we can continue doing this job that we love.
The numbers in between getting found and getting booked are largely irrelevant — views, likes, followers etc. Not completely meaningless, but almost meaningless considering our clients can’t really become repeat business!
My goal every year is to get as close to the UK VAT limit as possible, then stop. That means convincing 25-30ish couples to book me. Personally I have no short term desire to scale my business beyond this. For me, my family, and the lifestyle I favour, this is enough.
Overthinking the content thing lately has resulted in me posting almost nothing, which I do think is bad. There’s a page in the Austin Kleon book ‘Steal like an Artist’ which just says ‘do great work and show it to the world’ as a cornerstone of creative business. So I’m going back to doing that, and I’ve just signed up with Tailwind again so I can start scheduling in some instagram posts again so at least I’m putting something out there.
I won’t be making reels that don’t show off my work, because I don’t quite understand the desired result.
I won’t be making behind the scenes reels to show how I make my work, because I think it destroys the magic, and that’s the last thing I want to do.
I won’t be turning my client slideshows into reels because I don’t make client slideshows!
I will go back to posting my work as posts, because I do truly believe that at least putting your work out into the world is a million times better than doing nothing.
So…. after all that I guess the moral of this week’s issue is ‘instead of doing nothing, do something’ and keep putting your clients first. We don’t all have to hop on the ‘content creation’ treadmill to keep up. I hope that helps!!!
Thanks for reading.
Adam
PS – The lyric at the top is from Bo Burnham’s Netflix special ‘Inside’ which is absolutely mind-blowingly brilliant as a piece of comedy, poetry and performance art. Highly recommended.
PPS – There’s nothing wrong with being a content creator! It’s absolutely a viable way of making money in 2022. I recently shot the wedding of a full time influencer/content-creator who was doing very, very well for themselves and clearly making more money than I make from photography. I’m just saying I (me, Adam) just want to be a photographer. But maybe if you’ve got the will power, charisma and skills for content creation it could be a natural progression!
