The Struggles with Social Media
Every day when I wake up, I look at my social media. I look to see if any of my videos did well, if I gained any followers, and I answer any messages. In that process, I scroll to look at and interact with other creators, 99% of them food related. I both love and hate how social media has become this attempt for so many of us to make money or grow a brand. I love it because it helps and works for many, I hate it because it’s become increasingly more difficult to stand out and grow now that there are more and more people doing it every day, with changing algorithms and all these factors that seemed less significant a few years back.
It's easy for me to get discouraged when I look at other big channels and pages that have likes and comments out the wazoo and gain followers every day. I spend so much time and money on my content and a lot of the time it doesn’t really perform that well, even after researching times and days to post, things to include and so forth. It’s a giant headache and is basically a full-time job. Sure, my channel has grown and given me the credibility, achievements, and reputation I have today, which I’m very proud of. However, the sky-high numbers that I still dream of just don’t happen for my content, which makes it emotionally difficult. People don’t care what time and effort goes into the 30 second video they scroll past on social media pages. They care about what excites them and looks cool.
There’s a particular thing about my Instagram page that haunts me to this day, and that is the content I used to post and the reason I have the following that I do. There’s a reason my following is continuously dropping instead of rising, and that’s because a lot of my followers were there before the baking content. I posted thirst traps. Lots of body content, some quite suggestive. There was a time when I had no idea what I was doing with my life and didn’t care about my social media content, but I loved the attention I got from it. I grew a following of mostly one type that only looked at my page to see a body. Changing my profile from that to food obviously is going to be extremely difficult. Now, any time someone posts an inappropriate comment or sends me a creepy message, I get really annoyed. I clearly don’t do that anymore and all of that content is long gone from my profile.
Being gay is tough in the sense that I felt like I always had to look good to be popular. I feel like I’d only be considered attractive if I was super fit, and posting it online only made it worse, because I became an object, not a person. People thought they could just send whatever they wanted to me because of what I posted. But I figure if you’re putting so much out there, can you really be that surprised when people respond the way they do? Sure, it may not be what you want, but you can’t stop people from simply responding to what you’re providing. I feel like that past made it hard for me to be taken seriously when I started posting other content and getting rid of the old stuff. I never regret it because that only delays my daily progress towards my actual goals and dreams.
Social media will always be that difficult game for me, because while starting a new page is probably best, I’ve already had so many opportunities because people saw that big number. Little did they know that the number is just a façade, and a lot of those people will continue to leave and unfollow, which I hope they do. The only reason any of this matters this much to me is because I have built an entire brand and business from my social media and it’s my primary way of marketing myself, as it is for so many other businesses now. I want people to appreciate what I put out there because I work so hard to produce it, and I have to keep working every day at it to keep growing, letting go of the old followers and welcoming the new, who are there purely to enjoy food with me.
