Designing Beyond Likes: My Journey Away From Social Media Metrics

A journey of creative realisation and career development.

When I started out with my social media presence (specifically on Instagram) I took the 'one post a day' approach by taking part in a 30-day design challenge and my post engagement was not surprisingly very low as a new account but after the challenge, I slacked off and post engagement was seemingly the same if not better than when I posted every day then I came across this YouTuber's video on how Instagram's 'success' algorithm had AGAIN. This got me thinking and so in this article, I go over why I don't post frequently on social media.

1. Social Media Algorithms

Of course, the first reason is going to be due to the fact that social media algorithms are always evolving to determine what content is more popular amongst their users and so whatever strategy you had implemented as a creator to gain traction becomes meaningless overnight. You find yourself trying to feed a bottomless hunger which will eventually affect the quality of the work you put out.

Someone may say, "then just adapt to the change", but my answer to that is a car that keeps turns ends up going in a circle. I'd expect to learn from adaptation and not just pointlessly adapting to things without giving the needed time to the transition period to learn from it. So in the end I don't follow any strategy or timeline to sharing content I post when I have content to share.

2. There's More to Life

It's only natural that as a creative you hope that the content you put out is impactful to the people that view it but the danger comes when the inspiration of your content is extrinsic and not intrinsic - to post what people will like and not what they'll learn from.

And I understand when you use social media for business it's a numbers game and you want the most engagement on your posts because that means clients but I would hope that as a freelancer your aim is to add value to people and just want their money.

3. Quantity vs. Quality

I partly touched on this in my 30-Day Design Challenge article and learning to be healthy creatively has been a big part of my freelance journey. Navigating how to grow my skills and stand out as a designer while also doing it on my own terms has taught me that your designs are only as good as you are (mentality, physically, emotionally, spiritually you name it)

With social media, to continually grow you need to stay relevant to an exact and to do that you need to post constantly and with this, I found myself more focused on how many times I was posting and not what I was posting. You definitely have to be a great creator to post high-value content constantly on social media unless you have a team so as a lone wolf, I choose quality over quantity any day.

4. Posting ≠ Growth

It's normal to assume that a creator is constantly improving since they're constantly sharing their work because people only share their best version on social media but in reality that's not even half of it. It goes without saying that comparison is the killer of creativity and that doesn't mean don't track your progress but go about it in a healthy way.

Don't aim to have your growth measured against how often you post or the engagement you get because in the end there's a lot that goes into it (those algorithms we spoke about earlier) so find a credible metric to measure your skill development by.