27: Private vs. Public Social Media
with Andrew Ousley
So that goes back to something you said earlier, which is, What is the private and what is the public? And on some very basic level, somebody that's pursuing a performing arts career either has a private, that is under some pseudonym, or they just focus on the public.
Yeah. And this is, this is probably the most-- one of the most important things for artists as they approach social media is, it has to be somewhere in between the public and the private self. And if you want to have a completely private account, do it. Do it under a pseudonym, make it completely private, invite only, but know that you are going to split your following because especially in a place like Instagram, you're going to have some people who are going to only follow your personal and some people in your professional.
So you are dividing the power of, of your impact or doubling your work if you do it on both platforms. But the actual content and the storytelling has got to toe that line between personal and professional, because again, people come to your social media because they want a more honest and a more unfiltered look at who you are as a person.
Kellogg:
A direct connection.
Ousley:
Exactly. That said, if everything you post is too personal or oversharing, that's not the best presentation of you. And it certainly does not also tell them about your art. So you have these, these dangers of oversharing and sort of having every single post be this long bleeding heart monologue, which, is-- can be done every so often, but if all you do is that, then people are going to start to get-- tune you out. And also it distracts people from the music making, which is ultimately, again, what you want to promote via your social media. But if everything you do is only professional and here's the performances I've got here is this press that I've got. Here is all this stuff people are not going to feel a connection to you and they're going to feel like they're just getting a data dump of information of your career or just getting the polished publicity.