Instagram used to hurt my feelings. Anyone with wanderlust and a fondness for aesthetics should avoid scrolling through the Gram because you'll suddenly realize that your breakfast isn't as photogenic as the ones at those hotels that model in the beautiful clothes is staying in. Where is Sa Riera anyway? Does Spain ever have bad weather? Where was she last week with the waterfall and the tigers?
I used to follow lots of travel photographers, local Hawaiians, and interior designers on Instagram and seeing their perpetual highlight reels made my little dream life seem a lot less shiny. I started to feel like I needed to work harder (which may actually be valid) and earn more money so I could buy artful furniture and take more vacations ... that I'd still be too modest to ever post on Instagram.
The Gram is an infinite chasm of best case scenarios. It's full of perfect bodies, flawless skin, dream weddings, romantic proposals, designer puppies, gastronomic feats, celebrity mansions, parties you weren't invited too, clothes you can't afford, attractive people that would never hang out with you, gardens you can't grow in your hardiness zone, and other sorts of things that are so infrequent to a normal existence that there are people who's job it is to photoshop, tweak and distort someone's reality so it seems more envy worthy. This makes me sad and I'm a relatively secure person. Imagine what this does to people who were already feeling inadequate.
I still scroll through mind you - can't fully tear myself away. I scroll through Facebook in a similar fashion. I don't often post things but I look at other peoples photos and comments and draw conclusions and judgments that aren't necessarily fair. Brett told me this is called "lurking" in his social media scroll of choice, Reddit. I'm honestly quite bored by it all. It's the same crap everyday. I might have packed up my personal Instagram for good but then I went and started ole Lux and nothing promotes an "aesthetics business" like the dern Gram.
Initially, having a respectable number of "followers" on Instagram was my biggest source of stress for the new business. The fewer followers a business has, the less likely folks are going to take you seriously. I harassed everyone I knew to "follow" Lux and I worried and felt embarrassed for the first year of just double digits in the follower column. I reluctantly started using hashtags and overtime I received photo galleries of my bouquets and arrangements which supplied me with a stock of photoshopped images that I could just toss up onto the Gram and my follower count would grow a bit each week.
At the start of the Spring season this year, Lux n' U had been stuck at about 500 followers. The reality of this is actually amazing. There are 500 people who subscribe to whatever flower crap I'm going to spout whenever I feel compelled to spout it. 500 people! But the reality of Instagram is that it has approximately 1 billion users per month. My 500 people are a grain of salt next to an elephant's leg. My local competitors have a few thousand followers. This only bothers me when I read my meaty, humorous flower posts and then scroll through their vacuous trend-jargon phrases they post that don't even apply to the photo. I often wonder what would happen if I started captioning photos with things like "Yaas!" or "Squad Goals" or some other phrase whose definition you had to look up just now.
In recent weeks, my marketing research has led me to the undeniable results of "interacting" with your followers. You can post short, temporary videos on Instagram and it "creates a connection to or a personality for" your business. I could think of nothing more cringeworthy than filming myself pretending to talk to an audience. So I gave it a try.
It's been fascinating and humiliating. The first video I posted was an excitable explanation of peony sizes and I was flooded with comments and messages from friends and strangers. People think I'm "adorable" and while that's flattering, I wasn't doing anything except talking about flowers and it left me feeling on the outside of a joke... about myself. I was embarrassed by the whole thing and decided I wasn't going to do that again. But then my numbers grew.
I have since posted four videos and each time, my heart races and my finger pauses before I hit the button to "share" it. I feel awfully vulnerable until the messages of praise come in. And I like the messages of praise but I'm still not sure if people are laughing with me or at me and I feel a bit "dance monkey dance" about it. The other side of the coin though, is that I'm being pelted with inquiries and new brides and my flowers are being picked up and featured on wedding blogs. This is great for business and for a small portion of my ego, but surely I can't be expected to come up with entertainment for the masses (being my grain of sand people) and not get sucked into the praise and the fun of it all. I don't even believe in the vapid, priority-less publications that "are, like, so gorg!"
In one month I've gained 100 new followers. I get lots of sweet notes from people asking questions and telling me that my excitement for flowers makes them smile.
Maybe I'm writing this in such way that makes it sound like I'm worried about becoming Insta-Famous and that's certainly not what I mean to say. "The girl got 600 followers and hired a film crew and make-up artist."
What I'm getting at is that this isn't something I really condone or admire but it's great for business and occasionally flatters my ego. Does that make me a dancing monkey? Or is the joke on them and I'm capitalizing on the mindlessness of American youth? Is that wrong or is it genius busnissmanship?
My hope is that by continuing to only post photos and videos with genuine humanness and thought behind them, it'll weed out the folks that are looking for soul-damaging content and just keep around the people that really like flowers... or perhaps just the nerdy girl that gets to play with them.
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