How to Promote Your Work Online Without Sounding Like a Pompous Asshole
One of the worst ways to promote your work online is to showcase your god complex . Of course, it is worth celebrating what makes your work valuable. At the same time, you don’t want to annoy your potential (or existing) audience. On the other hand, some talented artists struggle with the inherent selfishness that comes with publishing their work. So how do you avoid both of these traps? The key to self-promotion is a balance between confidence and sass. Here are our tips to help you do just that and promote your work online without looking like a giant asshole.
Strive for Authenticity
Any self-promotion is curation. Publishing information about yourself and your work online seems inconsistent with being “real”. Once you accept this fact, you can work on a basic version of social media authenticity. One of the best ways to achieve this is to tell stories in your social media posts so that you will be known when it’s time to promote your work. Include bits and pieces of your life in all your posts. This could mean details like your city, community, or cute pet photos from time to time. All in all, it helps to have a distinct voice that makes you stand out and sound more personable.
One word of caution: most users are highly critical and scrutinize brand voices online. If you don’t spend a lot of time looking at the apps you’re trying to post to, then it will be obvious that you don’t really speak their language.
Highlight your best things
As a stand-up comedian, I’ve watched other artists get invited on shows and have a growing fan base, not because their material is so much better than others, but because they’re especially strategic about promoting their best stuff.
While you as a user want to outperform social media algorithms , you want to use them to your advantage as someone who posts. Some basics: Post early in the day, post at least once a week, use relevant hashtags, and make sure your posts are visually appealing . It’s anecdotal, but posts with someone’s face in them seem to work better than posts with no people at all. Major social media platforms reward frequency, so don’t be alarmed if not all of your posts perform at the same level. This is not online meritocracy.
Communicate with your audience
My family’s restaurant has weathered the pandemic in part thanks to efforts to energize our social media presence by constantly posting stories with restaurant opening hours and menu additions. At the same time, I was working for a documentary film company that managed to stay in the spotlight of customers by sending out monthly newsletters.
The key here is to be focused. Find your niche instead of constantly trying to reach the widest possible audience. Try including interactive polls or questions in your captions – anything that encourages your followers to interact with you. Then answer – the more you can connect with your audience (as long as you treat them with kindness), the easier it will be to prove that you are not some kind of asshole and that your work is worth their time and attention.
Join the online community
In the early days of Twitter and Instagram, the sites had a “follow for the sake of following” culture. The basic idea was that by following each other and sharing your respective content, you and random strangers could mutually increase your following. The same quid pro quo still exists today, but for the most part it’s more subtle and sincere.
When you join an online industry community, you must communicate and collaborate with peers who are also in the self-promotion game. You can expand your network and subscribe by interacting with your peers’ content and sharing their work with your audience. Plus, you can connect with new people who can share their industry-specific tips on how to promote the work.
Let your work speak for itself
Self-promotion is real, but at the end of the day, the quality of your work has to match your hype. Don’t put the cart (your ego) before the horse (your work). And in no case should you call yourself a “guru”.