Today, both Facebook and Instagram are offline, and this once again highlights how an over-reliance on social media for artists can be a big problem, as it’s like “having your egg in one basket”

Common misconceptions about social media customers v users

The social media customer is the one who pays for the service. Those who access the service without paying financially (they may be paying in other ways, such as helping to promote the platform) are essentially “users.”

As users, they are at the company’s mercy and subject to its dictates. Don’t get me wrong, social media platforms such as Facebook can be excellent resources for sharing information and reaching a wider audience, BUT they are not there to serve as a charity supporting artists.

Some artists don’t get this and keep whining and complaining that these multi-billion-pound concerns aren’t helping promote their work for free! While on the platform, some complain about the platform calling it “Facebook” and other such daft terms, and whine about FB and other media, expecting customers to pay for the service.

Create and invest in your own online presence as a central hub

The smarter way to work is to create and invest in your own online presence as a central hub for your work. Yes, use social media to drive traffic, but if you have your own site, you OWN the real estate, and you dictate how the content is presented to the wider world. This requires an investment of time and finance, of course, but if you are serious about reaching a wider public, it’s essential to “work on the business as well as working in the business”

If you are wholly reliant on third party concerns, then if they disappear or are offline, you then have no means to connect to the wider public.

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STOP PRESS – ON THE NEWS WIRES

“The core complaint this time was simple. Instead of their usual feeds, many Facebook users were met with a stark system notice: ‘Your account is currently unavailable due to a site issue. We expect this to be resolved shortly. Please try again in a few minutes.’
That is not the sort of message people tend to ignore. Screenshots of the warning bounced from X to Reddit to TikTok in minutes, as users tried to work out whether they had been hacked, banned or simply caught up in another Meta technical mess.”