Why I Stopped Tumblr
I was writing on Tumblr for a while. And, don’t get me wrong, Tumblr is amazing. But, with every good thing, there’s a downside. Engagement was mine. I’m not going to blow the hoot and say that I had 12k followers or something stupid like that. I had a modest fan base, so I’m saying this with understanding only from my experience.
Last year, I dumped operating on Tumblr obsessively and worked on solely developing my Instagram through marketing hacks, campaigns, and businesses like SocialDrift. It worked to a degree. Yet, it didn’t take long for me to realize it wasn’t right.
I thought I wanted followers. But, what I really wanted was engagement. I wanted people engaged with my work, looking deep and delveloping genuine feedback. I wanted fans. I wanted to grow with them. And, I didn’t. I hit a peek and then nothing. There were many comments, likes, followers, then nothing. There was happiness from collaborators, business partners, and then nothing. The silence stung. I went from feeling great to depressed. My poetry started to suffer too. I became more invested in marketing myself, so I could get the high of having people like me rather than working on what really mattered, my material.
And that’s when it dawned on me.
See, people get caught up in the numbers rather than the support. Fans are not followers because they like what you do. They aren’t dead accounts or washed up people that don’t know you. They’re people that are friends, really. If you admire someone like Shane or Mark from YouTube, you’re liking them like a friend. You watch them cry, you watch them grow, you watch them eat weird things. And, that’s a huge difference. I have a few of these sort of people myself that became so much more than a following. I love what they’re doing be it engineering, drawing, or trying to learn Korean.
These are real people with real goals, dreams aspirations just like yourself. You can buy a following for as little as $6.00, but having people who love you and you them, that’s something you can’t buy. You’ll only ask with fake followers or crappy marketing, “where did the people go? Why don’t they respond?”
And they don’t, because they are not there.
In all of this tragedy, I’m back on Tumblr and haven’t given up Instagram. I learned something humbling. No, I don’t need to buy likes and followers to make it, and I didn’t. I just did marketing, thank God! Neither should you have to worry about those things. Algorithms change, people leave, strategies are competitive but we all have one powerful counter, being ourselves. No one else can be you. No one else is going to have the same words that you will. The people will come, and sometimes that just takes a while.
Please, if anyone reads this, be yourself and don’t worry about the graphs. They really aren’t important.