spamming with “promotional” scams
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Posing as unreasonably good looking women offering followers/money/fame and fortune in return for your earthly soul.
Unfortunately, none of them seem particularly interested in my offer of sandwiches as payment.
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Extending a little on the OP…and i feel your pain, social media is a f***ing clown show, no offence to any clowns 
I’m seeing Instagram be used for communication/booking and promotion around live music events.
What approach do you find is a good alternative? It might be a different platform, combination of services or going outside your studio and meeting people, and playing? Curious what people find works and what doesn’t both as artists and as event organisers.
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I have to keep a ghost account on Facebook to keep up with local gigs and open mics, as that’s where most of them seem to be announced/promoted.
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can I interest anyone in a sandwich? just sign up for this plug in trial that you can’t cancel with a credit card that you can’t withdraw. did I mention there’s a sandwich?
for details follow sandwiches at sandwichscam dot net
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You had me at sandwich
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I’m thinking about the same question. Time and attention are expensive. I’m thinking of being intentional about what do I want to get from social media, and then check whether I’m getting it or not. If yes, stay. If not, leave.
The right approaches will differ if the goal is to learn, make contacts, know about local gigs, share your music… but each of these activities can be measured against results.
The problem is that social media are designed to make you forget about your initial intentions and just keep giving your time and attention by routine and addiction. And they are very good at that.
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Yep 100% agree with all this. It’s good to check if it works i feel, and on multiple levels too.
I also created a bs account for local scene after refusing for a long time. I was participating and acting genuine in the “community” (aggressive scare quotes) for months, then basically got some sort of shadow ban on current and subsequent FB accounts because I was not using a name that meta could harvest as a real person.
I hate that this is the norm for local stuff and don’t really understand why it hasn’t moved to discord/discuss + some event platform. I’m as lazy as anybody but as has been said over and over the Facebook experience-ethics are miserable.
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If anyone wants to try Bluesky, message me, I have a bunch of invite codes. Not a ton of musicians on there that I have found, I’m there because my other communities have migrated there, but it’s pretty OK so far, decently moderated and lively.
The invite-focused/walled garden nature of Discord makes it awful for discoverability and networking. I’m in a few that I like (local synth scene, m8, a few gaming ones) and it’s ok for organizing inside the community. But getting exposure to other people is almost impossible.
The conversational chat-like nature is also just bad for long term discussions/ finding info and it tends to be dominated by the regulars.
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Yeah, agreed. This last point is what makes it the hardest to bridge into those communities. There must be another way. Maybe old guy attitude, but I find the forum/message board to be the sweet spot.
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Good strategy, but please do not think that you can outplay Meta… Never. They still trying hard to show the announcements about local events 3 days later after they finish… in their “smart” feed 
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I haven’t really implemented what I’ve learned of ‘shameless self-promotion’ but if your making interesting things and you get it in front of enough people, then your audience will grow. I think Banksy nailed it for popularizing himself. But I’m not suggesting you do illegal graffiti, b/c I don’t want you throwing back on me when you get arrested. But people will talk and you may end up in the news and then bam your off!
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Another super-annoying feature: when you are trying to share the content via link on the other platforms, they add tracking token as the url parameter. Like very curious how and where do people share the links outside their platform. Recently noticed YouTube started doing this. Meh
Regarding Epic, I don’t think they will do something disastrous, looking at every other tool they bought, they made them either free/more affordable and better, I think Epic’s endgame with Bandcamp is easy way to do music licensing, which is win win for everybody.
What approach do you find is a good alternative?
First define what you are talking about.
If the goal is to promote your work as an artist. Pay someone to do it for you, on all social medias, and never ever open them to look at the comments. That person must be a trained PR person who know how to promote your work without ever engaging with people and/or subjects outside of your work and know how to deescalate in case you do something in a gig that would make people trying to cancel you.
If the goal is to just know about stuff happening in your area, I suggest the following: RSS.
First find a good RSS feed reader and or aggregator.
First prioritize subscribing to rss pages of the artists / places you like on their respective web pages if they have one. If their website don’t have an rss feed, try fetchrss,rsshub or any other website to rss generation app.
For each social media you want to follow people/pages, use a service that do not forces you to create an account and allows you to present it as an rss feed.
For example, for twitter/X you can find a nitter instance, and follow the user by using the following url in your rss reader: https://nitter instanceurl/twitter username/rss
Same for youtube with an invidious instance, using the https://invidious instance/feed/channel/channelcode
Facebook to RSS - FetchRSS can work with facebook pages (but not user profiles).
There used to be the same for instagram, with a thing called bibiliogram but I think it is now dead. There are however a multitude of “instagram viewers” pages that allow you to see the last few posts of a public username. But you have to check them out manually. The upside is you won’t use an account and will not feel the need to interact.
Possible alternative: https://aktu.io
it pretends being able to give you feeds of facebook/instagram/twitter. The prices aren’t too high if you take into account it can preserve your sanity by not having the social medias apps installed. I am not sure if you need to have your own actual fb /instagram users for it to work. There are probably services I haven’t found / considered yet.
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This is great advice. TIL. Thanks.
Great resource thanks for sharing.
As i say, i was curious both as an artist and an event organiser, which covers a wider range of considerations, which your post does a great job at considering. Nice one 
Epic and win win for everybody in the same paragraph?
We are certainly not talking about the same thing.