Timeline real-Estate during Covid-19 : A guide for artists and their friends.

Hi everybody. Robert the marketer here and not Robert the guy from Tuath/Lunch Machine/Craos (which will be back in action soon) so treat me as if I am a different person for the rest of this. So I see a tonne of content being shared, a lot of my friends are musicians and so a lot of my friends are doing live streams, making content and so on. I can like, share, tag, regram and so on but the thing is: if I keep doing this on my own timeline then it just becomes a contrived platitude with side effects. See people expect certain content from me and they come to my page for it. They tend only to share the videos from my page that have an element of humour in them which is good as that’s our brand. If I share a friend’s acoustic guitar song on my page, my followers will go “WTF is he sharing this for?? I WANT MEMES N BULLSHIT.” If I keep doing it over and over again people are going to stop coming to my page altogether and thus anything I would have shared has suddenly decreased in value.

The thing is, people see right through it when you share something out of support and often just click love react out of the goodness of their hearts which is fine but it’s unfortunately a performative eco system that virtually props up your friends but doesn’t actually do anything, stifling them and leaving them in limbo. This is why we don’t buy likes for our page. If we do this it means down the line we are paying money to advertise to fake profiles in a click farm, it means our data is contaminated. So yeah it makes you feel good and all and it appears supportive, retweeting things from your friends or whatever, but I really feel like we should be using our platforms more effectively.

Here’s what I wanna say: a more constructive use of our time that shows people that you actually know them and genuinely support them is this. Say you see some content that is not your usual thing but you can think of specific people who would enjoy it, don’t broadcast it on your timeline taking up valuable real estate, just tag them in either the comments (which will help the original post far more) or send the content to them directly in a message. These two things are far better! They keep people’s timelines free of things that could be perceived as inapplicable to them and so it keeps the property value high, whilst also giving you the opportunity to send something directly to someone who will genuinely enjoy the thing, instead of it just being lost on whoever scrolls past it in their feed. This requires objectivity and thoughtfulness which are good things to exercise I reckon.

Now all of this might sound cynical or lecturey but I don’t intend it to sound like that at all. I am just saying this because music is already devalued enough, we need to come together here and get things to the right people or not at all because we may actually be doing damage to our friends.

Just think: What are you yourself about? What do people like about you? Play to that, share based on that instead because it will make a far more positive impact, believe me. Anyway, thanks for reading. Hope this is helpful. Have at it in the comments if you wish.