Advertising without social media advertising

I thought about re-activating my LinkedIn account this week.  LinkedIn was the social media platform I cared least about scrolling through, mostly due to its brand banalities, weird life oversharing (“Hey! Look at me! I’m in business but I’m also a real human person with complicated feelings! Now watch as I inappropriately dissect those feelings on a business networking platform!), and silly award show-offs.

Business awards are a strange beast, aren’t they?  Most of them seem to be proffered by dubious bodies no-one’s heard of.  There are so many of them now, that I think we need to start separating the award-wheat from the award-chaff.  So when someone posts about winning an award they should also have to declare if they’ve paid for it, like when influencers have to post #ad on things they promote online for money.  In an ideal world, etc.

I thought about going back to LinkedIn because sometimes it feels like the world-at-large has forgotten about me.

When I say the world-at-large I suppose I’m really talking about my ideal audience: that strange, nebulous beast that I have to feed, apparently, with regular contact.

I haven’t been in contact with my ideal audience for a while, mostly because I haven’t got anything useful or interesting to tell them.  I’m always struck by marketing gurus’ ever-constant advice to keep in touch: to post regularly, to let people in behind the scenes, to send them daily emails so you’ll be front-of-mind when they need whatever it is you flog.

It doesn’t matter what you say, only that you say things often.  That’s why people constantly say stupid things just for the sake of saying them, and why social media is such a dull place to live.  It’s why my email Junk folder is bursting at the seams, and why I only thought about re-activating my LinkedIn account for a milli-second.

Because I really don’t want to go back.

What I want, I suppose, is to not be forgotten about because I’m good at what I do.

You just have to give people the opportunity to find that out, which is hard when you’re not really online.  It also helps if you know what you want people to know you’re good at.  When I tell people I’m a writer they tend to want to know what I write, but I never know how to explain that properly because everything I do is different.

So right now I’d have to say something like: “I write for a wonderful travel company three days a week, and on the other two I write for myself.  At the moment I’m reviewing Aubrey Gordon’s gorgeous documentary Your Fat Friend, to enter into a major competition I’m 99% sure I won’t win.  I’m also working on my first novel.  I write show and theatre reviews for a local website, I ghost-write other people’s books, and I copywrite and ghost-blog for different company websites.”

As I wrote all that, I realised how lucky I am.  Ten years ago, if someone told me I’d be doing all that I’d feel indescribably giddy.  But it’s hard to squidge all that into an easy answer to the terrible question, “…so, what do you do?”

I also thought about going back on LinkedIn because I miss people.

Not all people, granted.  Just the ones I like; who I don’t see all the time.  Life isn’t really geared towards in-person conversations anymore, not when you can post something on Facebook and be fairly certain everyone you know will see it.

(“Well it’s on Facebook,” people will grunt sometimes, when I tell them I didn’t know about something important to them.  When I explain I’m not on any social media, their faces fall and they look mildly annoyed.  It’s sort-of fun, really).

I’m not ready to go back on social media.  I hope I never will be.

I will have to find new ways of communicating, though.  The old ones aren’t fit for the way the world has evolved, and the new ones aren’t fit for me.

(If you have any answers for me, feel free to send them on a postcard!)