Why the internet make it hard for people to self-promote
I understand that many people are spamming to promote, and that's not okay. However, it's possible to create dedicated threads or posts on social media every week for people to promote their websites, services, art, or anything else
It's called the Attention Economy. Getting peoples attention is so important today that it's seen as a commodity to be bought and sold. You're question is equivalent to asking why it's so hard to find gold.
I think it's because the Internet is paid for in large part by self promotion via ads, so free self promotion is discouraged in favor of paid self promotion.
The problem with paid ads is that people and businesses with the most money are the ones benefiting from it.
It’s pay-to-play unfortunately. Most moderated communities have regular weekly threads for self-promotion to avoid spamming the main feed. As an independent musician, I follow those rules and post only where appropriate. The other way is create your own social media artist pages, try to get as much visibility as you can, and promote from there.
Yes, it's called running a business. Spending money on advertising is a requirement if you want to start one.
It doesn't take much money if your work is good, though. My wife is a tattoo artist and she built up her following in just 1 year to the point where she's booked out 2 months, and she only promoted posts for $20 or so here and there.
Self promotion isn't an easy thing to do, so I'd suggest reading some how-to articles about how to grow your Instagram following. It requires a lot of work, to the point where managing your social media is a very large part of the job.
At the beginning my wife spent about 75% of her time on social media, while the other apprentice didn't. Now the other apprentice struggles to have more than a few appointments a week.
It makes it easier IMO, have you tried self promoting IRL? It's a lot harder than on the Internet.
I’m guessing OP means it’s harder now than before the corporate siloing of the social web, not harder than handing out business cards on the street.
It's not, though. If anything that makes it easier to gain a following.
Things like that exist. Hacker News has a monthly "Who's Hiring" thread, lots of forums have advertising sections, etc.
I guess i should have say social media since i don't really use traditional forum nowadays. In facebook groups, reddit subs and lemmy communities i rarely see them allowing self promotion. The exception is communities that allow promotion of other communities
Did you have a question or are you informing us that we can use the internet to promote our projects?
From the looks of things, you're an artist who doesn't know how to promote themselves on the internet. I have an idea: don't. Build up your body of work, present it in public at a gallery. Do something locally that will get eyes on your artwork. Do a huge wall mural. Do a big guerilla piece of artwork involving a group of people. If you're a musician, you should be playing shows, not worrying about your online presence.
Art is consumed and spit out by the internet faster than you can say "artistically bankrupt". It won't garner you much attention to advertise and promote your art online.
That's really not true at all. For many artists social media is the only or best way to gather a following and advertise their products.
It takes a ton of hard work to build that following since the art market is heavily saturated, especially post-covid, but social media is the best tool for the job.
OP just doesn't know what they're doing and thinks it's a walled garden.
It is really easy to self promote. The problem is that it is easy for everyone else to self promote as well.
Title talks about "the internet", your text talks about "social media" - and threads so seemingly a subset of social media.
The internet doesn't make it hard. It's incredibly easy. Sending emails is easy. Hosting a website is easy. Posting to platforms is easy.
Platforms and communities restrict - through their own rules - what they deem acceptable within their own scope. That's more about defining scope than "making it hard".
Reasonable self promotion is often accepted on reddit and lemmy. Blatant advertising is not. Be part of the community, or run an ad for an ad. Be a good participant rather than a spammer.
One of the first popular lemmy communities was one for announcing and therein promoting your own communities.
Make a sublemmy for your stuff; people who are interested will follow it.
Make highlights on insta containing your various projects.
It's not about the promotion, it's about how and where it's done.
Good luck getting visibility on instagram "It's not about promotion, it's about how and where it's done" I agree with that, that's why i said self promotion shouldn't transform to spam. With a post created by the admin where people promote their stuff in comments you can avoid self promotion dominating the feed
Ya but that ain't 'viral'
As an OF girl in a saturated market I feel this 😂 but thanks to capitalisation it’s hard for anyone to promote themselves, because websites and companies would rather sell time and space to advertisers rather than allow space for independent creators / artists / musicians / whoever to promote themselves. I think the internet has made it simultaneously easier and harder for unknown artists etc to show the world what they’ve got. The barrier to get yourself out there is much lower (just make some social media pages and upload your stuff) but the barrier to actually be seen by the right people is much higher (find the right hashtags, somehow go viral, stroke of luck?) and while you want to connect with the right people you’re also cautious of being too spammy. Not sure what the answer is as it depends on what you’re trying to promote, but I personally am much happier to be “advertised to” by independent creators, artists than I am by billion dollar companies or someone who wants me to drink their weight loss shakes
I tried before to put posts about new music on instagram and i can tell you that hashtags are completely useless they only attract bots and scammers
Big banks hate little banks
why would they give you an ad space for free if they could charge for it. dog eat dog world