A Failed Influencer’s Relationship to Social Media

As much as I wanted to practice a healthy relationship with social media, I was trying to build a business.

Yours truly in the Gardens of Versailles; photo courtesy of Emily Hope.

And it just wasn’t possible to truly limit myself to a healthy amount of usage when I was churning out daily content.

I had an approach to influencerhood and business-building that was, admittedly, almost doomed from the beginning. I didn’t want to sell out and produce the kinds of content that were more likely to perform well. I just wanted to share poetry. I’d mix up the format, varying from digitally designed poems broken up by photos, travel poems with carousels of travel photos, Instagram puzzles, kinetic typography poetry, and later, recordings of myself reading my poems.

I made the quantity over quality mistake.

I approached poetry as a journal more than as a craft for many years. I wasn’t editing poems — I was just slinging them out to the world like McDonalds hamburgers. But I stuck with it because I wanted to build a platform to sell my eventual (and still yet unpublished) poetry books.

Platform building is great, but it can’t distract you from making a real product.