Am I Allowed to Leave Instagram?
As a sole-trader and aspiring writer I feel trapped by social media, but do I really need it?
I am addicted to social media, specifically Instagram. It is no secret that being on social media is bad for our mental health with the constant checking in awaiting those tiny dopamine hits - the likes, the shares and the numbers of followers with the inevitable disappointment and feeling of failure that follows. We substitute likes for our self worth and leave each session feeling less than.
I pick up my phone out of boredom numerous times a day, my fingers finding their way to the familiar camera icon and I scroll and scroll without any real destination in mind, without even really knowing that I am doing it. I am not looking for anything, yet I am shown parts of my subconscious I don’t want to see. I see envy as I compare myself to other mothers, other writers and other small business owners, I feel everything from sad and angry to bored and happy within seconds. I leave feeling worse every time, yet less than ten minutes will pass and I will pick up my phone and scroll again.
I have three accounts on Instagram. One is personal, to share photos of my family and our life to connect and stay in contact with people we know, a second is to promote my graphic design business and the third is to promote my writing. I post every now and then on each but never regularly. I consume much more than I create and have lost hours of my life to videos of people decorating elaborate cakes that I never intended to watch.
When it is going well, the interactions on my posts make me feel seen and heard. It reassures me of my existence on this planet, yet when my posts disappear into an abyss of no likes and worse, no acknowledgement, I feel worthless - like part of me has disappeared too.
Best selling author
echoed many of my thoughts on using social media in her piece “Being Offline”.“But the moment I get onto social media, my sense of self starts to fade and fracture. I don’t see the path [to success] any longer. I lose sight of it. I lose sight of myself. I doubt and battle against myself. Fear starts to kick up my heart rate. I start thinking things like ‘why me?’ and ‘how is this ever going to work out?’ and ‘why am I not there yet?’ and ‘if it hasn’t happened yet, it won’t’ and ‘I’m too old to be doing this’ and ‘I don’t deserve it.’”
Jamie Varon, Being Offline, Plot Twist
In my own recent piece My Children Bore Me, I admitted that taking to social media had become an addiction for me.
I may not be reaching for a glass of wine, but I am reaching for my phone, my portal to another world where my children aren’t a pressing issue, and I am not still sat in the same living room. It’s not doing me any favours though, and like giving up alcohol I am certain not scrolling would bring immediate health benefits.
Logically I have considered that my addiction to social media should be taken as seriously as any other addiction. I know I am addicted to caffeine, for example, and limit my intake accordingly. I know more than two cups of tea a day or any caffeine after midday affects my sleep and my lack of sleep affects my mood. I know this because when I didn’t drink a drop of caffeine for almost a year (due to pregnancy and breastfeeding) and I felt much better; much more alive. I have become aware of my craving for it, on those days following sleepless nights I visualise cans of Coke or find myself putting a caffeinated tea bag in my mug but I am mostly able to say no because I know what happens when I go past my limit.
In knowing that social media makes me feel bad in much the same way caffeine negatively effects how my body functions, I have sought to limit my use. I managed to delete Twitter off my phone, without regret, but my use of alternative apps, especially Instagram has remained strong. Regardless of what I tell myself about how I don’t need to pick up my phone, I still do, even if I have attempted to leave it in another room or zipped it inside my handbag. The urge to scroll is so strong I find myself returning to some form of social media so much I run my battery flat before lunch time.
of Substack Monday Monday acknowledges that for them social media is an another addiction they have struggled to manage.“In 2010 into early 2011 when I knew I was an alcoholic but not sure how to manage my drinking I would try to drink only on the weekends, only homemade beer, only gin, only only only. I would always get drunk, blackout, and wakeup somewhere I didn’t recognize. The reality was, there was no managing my drinking. And while the outcome of overusing an app on the phone may not look as physically dangerous, what it has done to my attention, self esteem, and zest for life is just as dark as what alcohol did to me.”
Marlee Grace, I quit instagram, Monday Monday
Similarly
of Substack Born of Wonder explains how she has found it hard to limit her use on social media.“So here’s what it came down to for me. Here’s the ugly truth: I just can’t handle it. Maybe you can - maybe you can put boundaries on your life and your phone use and log in every now and then and not think of that social media sphere ever again. So for those of you who use social media in a truly casual way, who don’t fall into doom scrolling or overthinking or comparison, this will all sound very dramatic. But I think for many people, especially young people, social media has played an outsized, disproportionate role in their life. It has hijacked areas of their brains related to dopamine and reward and it has robbed them of their attention spans. This is a real, crushing problem. This is serious.”
Katie Marquette, Why I deleted social media, Born of Wonder
If I can’t limit my use then giving up Instagram and Facebook entirely seems the obvious solution to help me rebuild my sense of self worth and find connection offline, but it isn’t that simple.
As a sole-trader and an aspiring writer striving to increase her audience, I feel trapped by social media.
I am worried I am not allowed to leave. I am worried I need to be on it.
One worry is that I need to promote the skills of design on a platform that I claim to be able to design for. But assuming that I would still be able to convince people of these skills regardless of being on the platform myself, I still need somewhere to promote my work.
My need for self-promotion is an issue. If writing and design are my businesses, then Instagram and Facebook are to some extent my shop windows. My social media accounts celebrate and show off my work and abilities in the same way my physical portfolio does. I display my wares publicly on a platform such as Instagram with 2.4 billion active users1 in the hope that someone will see them and eventually pay me for them.
I have FOMO: Fear of Missing Opportunities.
We all know those success stories where a single post on Instagram launched a career or how a viral video took a living room side hustle to a full-blown business venture. The amount of likes and shares can make or break the success of a small business.
Artist, author and serial entrepreneur
talked about her success story recently in her post What I learnt from having 500 k across social media.“That one post of me holding my first architectural embroidery in front of the original building (which by the way got seen by a woman who lived there and contacted me to buy it!), got us shared in online art magazines all over the world. From there it was just a roller-coaster ride with crazy highs, and brutal lows. It’s inexplicable to think that this image was what kickstarted our artistic careers.”
Elin Petronella, What I learnt from having 500k across social media, Follow Your Gut
Even if I am not looking for overnight success from a viral post, I have enough experience of posts creating work to make me nervous about leaving social media and therefore missing out on those opportunities of the future.
It was a competition on Twitter that found me my first illustration client. The lovely Elaine of The Honeymoon Period Podcast saw the tweet and contacted me to arrange a commission. If I hadn’t been on Twitter I wouldn’t have known about the competition to enter and my client wouldn’t have seen my entry and wouldn’t have commissioned me. This isn’t the overnight success story that Elin talks about but it only takes one post for a person to connect with and convert them into a potential client.
Instagram has its own rules
Without Instagram and Facebook, without my shop windows, I fear I won’t be able to make a living, yet in order for people to see the shop Instagram especially has its own rules. Instagram wants you to be physically present, it wants you to show up for your followers daily, (at least 3-5 times a week according to a recent social media course I undertook at the local library). It wants you to show your face, to get personal and perform. Part of the reason I thought I suited a career in design is because I am not a performer. I can hide behind a computer and work behind the scenes of the big presentations and client calls. In design, talent and hard work doesn’t need to be all singing and dancing. Writing was a career I thought had a similar appeal, but as in The Hyphen, writer
remarks that there has been a recent shift in the expectation of writers to be present on social media.“And while it is wonderful that social media allows writers to interact with readers and other authors, the scales have tipped us all into a place where there is no longer an option for a writer to simply focus on the writing, while not also becoming a public performer in the process.”
Donna Freitas, How social media has altered the writing career, The Hyphen
In order to grow I have to give myself over to the overlords of social media in the hope they will push my content and I have refused. My accounts have at most 450 followers but Instagram tells me that in the last month my business account reached as few as 68 people. So my shop, although open, has effectively been boarded up or at least remained shrouded so that the footfall that may have seen it have been directed to walk on past.
The creation of consistent content is essential for growth and engagement on Instagram. Artist
explains that her sustained presence on social media went on to grow her business by creating further opportunities.“Our online presence brought us our first traditional book deal for Mindful Embroidery which got published in 2020 (the publishers reached out to us), work with luxury brands, art exhibitions and creative students to our online embroidery academy from all over the world.”
A post going viral creates a following of people with expectation and so begins the hamster wheel of maintaining and growing the audience in order to stay in business. A process that is not for the faint hearted according to Elin who compares the creation of content to an exam that you have to take every single day.
“When running your art business online, it’s almost like every piece of content you put out is a final exam, where you either pass or fail. The only difference is that you’ve got to redo the test again. EVERY. SINGLE. DAY. And for most platforms, multiple times a day.”
Elin Petronella, What I learnt from having 500k across social media, Follow Your Gut
Trying to navigate a complicated algorithm alongside creating masses of quality content can take hours of time, which as a mum of two who effectively works part time, I can not afford to spend. At a recent Instagram workshop we all had the same excuse as to why we weren’t posting consistently and therefore not successfully grown our accounts – we had limited time.
in her recent piece It’s not me it’s you - my break up with Instagram acknowledges that mastering marketing through social media is a job in itself:In order to run a business solely through places like Instagram you have to be interested and invested in how they work. And that takes a lot of time, effort and commitment. It is literally a full time job for some. Instagram experts will convince you that you too can be an expert of this ever changing platform, but they rarely speak about how much time and effort that will take.
Erica Perry, It’s not you, it’s me…
Instagram isn’t working for me
If Instagram isn’t pushing my content and I am effectively running a shop, which they have boarded up or don’t allow people to see, then what is the point of being on there?
Surely I am already missing out. Perhaps effectively, I have already left a platform that doesn’t serve me.
When leaving Twitter, I transferred many of the people who I followed and with whom I valued the interaction with over to Instagram by finding their corresponding accounts.
Many of the success stories of leaving a social media platform such as Instagram or Twitter often involve transporting an engaged following over to an alternative platform, for example, Substack.
of Monday Monday, for example, admitted in their post that they “left Instagram with 28,000 people subscribing to [their] newsletter”. Despite being 32% percent of their 86.1k following, this is not an insignificant number of people.Similarly to my experience in leaving Twitter, there is less of a fear of missing out on any opportunities or business, as the hope is that they would have been transferred with the established mailing list. Without being able a transfer a following there is a genuine fear of losing years of hard work.
I was convinced my business would die without Instagram because it was built using it exclusively.
Erica Perry, It’s not you, it’s me…
Erica’s fear is a real one but for those of us who haven’t gone viral and do not have a substantial* following to lose there is no expectation of us to be there. We don’t need to rely on a social media platform to sustain our businesses. We are the lucky ones. We can leave.
*by substantial here I mean both significant in number or a smaller number but highly engaged.
Small business mentor,
left social media and claims it was the best decision for her business and has helped it thrive.“Looking back, it’s been one of the best business decisions I’ve ever made. Leaving social media was the first time I really started embracing marketing my business my way. It was the moment when I gave myself permission to completely follow what felt right to me—a strategy that I’ve been using ever since.”
Astrid Bracke, Six Lessons from Two Years without Social Media, Female Owned
Similarly,
acknowledges that having given up social media, her business continues to thrive despite creating content less frequently through her Substack newsletter The Arcane.Instagram and I broke up. The world didn’t stop. I didn’t die. And people still sign up to my events. I can create once a week on here, and it feels like true intimacy again. It feels like a warm cup of tea in the garden with my friends[…]We broke up, and I am thriving.
Erica Perry, It’s not you, it’s me…
Instagram is not the answer
Using Instagram as my sole marketing tool has been lazy and has not served me or my businesses effectively. I have just done what I thought everyone else was doing without much thought about who my potential audiences are and what they may want to see from me. There may be other success stories on Instagram, but I am not one of them and if I am not going to bow to the algorithm, I never will be, so I need to find an alternative marketing strategy: one that suits me.
Here are some possible alternatives I might consider for my design business:
Offline Marketing (leaflets, business cards, zines, postcards, ads in printed magazines)
Networking (IRL for local businesses)
Freelance Design Groups (online and IRL)
Linked-In and Ex-colleague Recommendations
Targeted marketing
Competitions or promotion of work in well known publications
Improve my design website
Substack and the creation of a mailing list to promote and provide updates on my work.
For my writing I intend to continue to build a community on Substack and develop my writing practice here. I would also love to do more collaborations with other writers and publications, and would consider entering competitions where my writing may get more exposure.
With alternatives in mind, it is clear that I don’t need to rely on a dubious social media platform that doesn’t work well for me. I need to be more intentional with my marketing and self-promotion rather than relying on the unlikelihood of going viral.
Social media negatively affects my mental health and if it is indeed as serious as I suspect and that I am indeed addicted to it, I need to instil boundaries that can’t be broken.
Whilst I may keep the accounts on Instagram and Facebook for now, I am ready to take a step back from relying on them as a form of marketing. In the spirit of the new year, it is a change I need to make, so not only do I think I am allowed to leave Instagram, I think I probably should for me and for my business.
If this post resonated with you, I would love to hear your thoughts. Please do join me in the comments.
How does using social media make you feel?
Do you rely on social media for your business? Are you too worried to leave?
Have you left social media? Has it affected your business/work?
What other forms of marketing do you rely on for self-promotion?
Thank you for reading. If you enjoyed Distracted please do share this post with a friend.
With 2.4 billion active users, Instagram ranks 4th among the biggest social media networks globally as of 2024. Source: Demand Sage
This is a fantastic post Kylie-Ann, and I resonate with so much of it. I also feel like I have to be on Instagram to promote my coaching business and my podcast. I'm inconsistent in my posting and show up more when I have an event or something to promote which isn't great either!! I overthink what I post, I'm not comfortable sharing my kids faces or names and I don't just want to share my random thoughts anout random things. Like you, I need to find other ways to market my business that feel better for me. The highs and lows of Instagram and mindless scrolling are just draining. Leonie Dawson has a good course on Marketing without social media too. X
Social media definitely helped me career-wise before in terms of making connections, discovery of my work for the handful of people who went onto give me opportunities that turned into a full time career as an editor and a part time career as an author, but I've similarly come to the conclusion that social media is an addiction that I've justified (for many of the same reasons around self-promo etc) for too long.
I've tried withdrawing completely, but also recognise that when I use it we'll, I actually enjoy it. So now I'm trying to moderate my use more with periods of complete withdrawal as a balance and then when I feel myself turning inside out because of it, I go cold turkey for a while.
In regards to the self promotion, I think what I've come to understand is that social media is great place to make connections and meet people you would other not meet, but actual opportunity comes from developing those relationships off social media, often always organically. And the way the algorithms are now pandering to paid advertisment over organic reach, the most effective use of social media for business is if you're going to pay for those ads that so many of us hate lol.
As an author, I've found that you're expected to have socials just because but some of the most successful authors I know are rarely on here and the viral success stories are few and far between (it's just the same handful of stories trotted out to explain why you *need* to be on social media). I feel like social media marketing has become a cop out for some in publishing when, as always, it's the marketing from publishers across different old and new media (inc. paid social ads) that actually moves the needle. So now I see my social media use as an entertaining hobby that is fun and provides some dopamine hits, but one that I need to moderate like my sugar intake.