Social Media vs. Tattooers
Or: “Is social media presence essencial for tattooers?”
I have been feeling very frustrated with social media lately — and I took two extensive live mentorships on the topic last year, so I’m not coming out of nowhere with this. The (bad) habit of checking frustrating metrics, the timeline addiction and the feeling that I’m just working for free and no-one is receiving the content I spend so long producing, is driving me a tiny bit insane.
(Little disclaimer before I continue: I know part of “social media” is not really made to be social and connect people. By now it is just another marketing platform and I’m okay with that. I’m talking here about the feeling that some of us artists get that we HAVE TO be on social media in order to be relevant.)
For a long time, specially after I finished both mentorships, I started questioning the need for my presence on social media. I’m not talking about deleting my accounts at first — they do need to exist as online portfolios for events or for the majority of the people who will search us on social media first. I’m talking more about deleting the apps from my phone and my iPad and never looking back (not before making a pinned post about how to reach me, of course). — Tipo um derradeiro “postei e saí correndo” virtual-literal.
Of course this asks for strategies and structures to be made before such decision (maybe). But when I started getting it all together, something was missing. I was wondering what people that follow me on instagram thought about it. So recently I asked in my stories: “Do you mind if a tattooer doesn’t have a social media presence?”, and surprisingly, these were the results, from 76 people who voted:
(sorry for the huge image on the desktop version. I still haven’t found out how to make the images smaller in the blog 🤦🏻♀️ )
I was very happy to see the results, kinda like an “I told you so” feeling — queue the minute 2:37 of this song. I have been talking to many tattooers about social media and we are all so frustrated about it for many different reasons (and some of us spending big money to promote posts and having almost no return — disappointed, but not surprised). One of the people who used to be my social media mentor would say that this is because they don’t know how to make an advertisement with good catchy content. I agree, but I also think it’s a bit more complex than that for us tattooers (but this is for another post).
All of this is to say that I am cooking up some changes related to that for the next months, and I hope you all bear with me. I can’t wait for the time that I can actually create the content I want and love, and not worry if it will have engagement of not (I mean, of course there will be more SEO metrics, etc, but I’m focusing here specifically on the overwhelming “nothing I do is working” social media contemporary feeling).
I have been slowly getting to the conclusion that the use of social media by a tattooer can be a bit different from other creative professions that can rely only on marketing strategies or big sales funis, for example (unless of course we talk about tattoo online courses, then it’s another story. Here I’m talking more about tattoo sessions. In person. On living skin).
Maybe instead of sales funis or big marketing strategies for all social media, we just have to go back to the basics of marketing 101 and focus on storytelling, impeccable service and one or two reliable communication channels to maintain relationship with our customers. And then maybe going against what the “internet gurus” say, and actually go back to promoting our services more in person or in on-on-one communication, slower but more efficient.
I’m not sure yet how to grow in reach like that nowadays though… there is a big difference in tattooing since I started more than 10 years ago. But I’m just putting my first thoughts out there. I hope you get something out of it and if you have anything to share on this topic, please do. I would love to hear your thoughts. Either comment below like a true 90’s blogger (you can even use a cool nickname) or send me a message. Just not an instagram DM please 😆.
