Sick (of social media)

I spent the last two weeks of 2024 reflecting on my shift from tech to circular fashion, and this week I was planning to share my intentions for 2025 -

A year of no new clothes

But between coming down with a nasty cold and ruminating on recent news about Meta and TikTok (is ‘masculine energy’ in the room with us? Actually, don’t answer that…), I decided instead to scratch together this shorter post.

Back in October, I wrote about feeling ‘blocked’ on social media, specifically Instagram and TikTok. I found it hard to get myself to post consistently about Next Season because 1) I didn’t particularly enjoy the (content creation) work and 2) I didn’t feel like it was worth it. I decided to try and re-frame my relationship with social media and set myself a ‘100 day challenge’ to:

• Comment and / or messaging 5 people per day, per channel

• Post on IG & TikTok ~3-5 times per week

• Get back to publishing this newsletter on a weekly basis

I’m here to report, 78 days later, that this challenge has been an epic fail. I realized within a few weeks that these goals weren’t working for me, and my biggest self-critique is not that I ‘quit’ the challenge, but that I didn’t write about (or act on!) my learnings sooner!

Honestly I could go on about my (negative) feelings about social media. Less the ‘idea’ of it and more the specific platforms that dominate and control what content we users actually see (I’m heartened to read

Taylor Lorenz

’s post about efforts to build new ‘open’ social media platforms). There’s no doubt social media is a useful and important tool for sharing / spreading information - BUT there’s also no question that, unlike 10 years ago, it’s not easy / cheap to build up a following on these mega platforms. For a new small business, the effort required must be weighed against other marketing efforts and business efforts in general (I really appreciated

Matilda Lucy

’s recent post about subtracting as a growth strategy).

But I did learn from this challenge, and the reframing I did in October still stands true for me. Even though growing Next Season’s Instagram following is not a primary goal for 2025, I’m not ready to give it up altogether either. So after 78 days of (mostly not) posting, I’ve identified some tweaks I can make to tune my social media plan going forwards.

What did I learn → new focus

• Forcing myself to find 5 things / people to engage with (authentically, aka not just sending a passive ‘like’) on each channel (TikTok, IG, Substack) each day took a lot of time. I could see my app usage spiking, and I resented this → I’ve found that reaching out to people to meet, collaborate with, learn from, etc. has been incredibly rewarding and I definitely plan to continue this, just not forced through the lens of 5 per day per social media app. A more effective habit (for me) is sending 5-10 true ‘outreach’ messages per week (and channel agnostic - I actually find that DMs on LinkedIn, and good ‘ole email seem to work best for me).

• I really don’t enjoy making short-form video (TikToks, IG Reels) but I don’t mind and even kind of enjoy creating ‘photo dumps’ for Instagram → stop worrying about video and focus on posting regular ‘photo essay’ / ‘photo dump’ style posts on IG. The impending TikTok ban definitely makes this decision easier for me, I wasn’t really using it but now I can free up the mental space that was spent thinking that I *should* use it…

• I like writing and engaging on Substack → I’m already reading (& engaging) pretty regularly, and will continue aiming to publish weekly (even if that means I actually publish every other week).

Beyond these social media-specific goals, I can’t wait to share all of the IRL stuff I’m planning this year (workshops! new knitwear designs!) in next week’s post. In the spirit of ‘photo dumps’ here’s a little preview of some knitting swatches & product development I’ve been working on lately:

Thanks for reading <3