I Stopped Looking at Social Media, my Photography Boomed

Social media was once the backbone of marketing for photography businesses. However, we now have strong reasons to leave it behind and adopt a different approach to photography. Why did my recent behavior change prove this to be true?

There are lessons we learn all the time in photography. Some of those could be discovered through new ways of taking photos. Alternatively, it could be finding hidden features of our cameras. However, sometimes we learn something unexpected that can significantly affect our photography.

In February 2004, there were two major launches. On the 4th, Facebook was launched. Ten days later, Flickr came online. The former became a fabulous way to keep in touch with friends around the world, and the latter became a way to share photos with other photographers.

Despite Rupert Murdoch’s reported attacks and threats, Facebook overtook what was then News Corporation’s site, Myspace.

Then, in July 2006, Twitter became available to the public, and four years later, Instagram followed suit. Ever since, new social media platforms have sprung up.

The rise of fast-moving social media platforms saw the demise of many friendly, leisurely-paced online forums: SnapMyLife, Elements Village, and Radar, to name but three.

Getting friends and followers on these platforms became the thing to do. People made connections with people they had never met, giving strangers insights into their private lives. The drive for ever more Likes became imperative. The more friends you had, the more likes you got. More Likes made it more likely your posts would be seen.

Social media grew alongside smartphones. Consequently, photography changed, with most images being selfies, plus photos of meals and cats. Then short videos emerged, and all the social media platforms promoted them instead of still pictures as they competed with TikTok.

Social media then used our data and clever algorithms. Motivated by making profits from advertising, it sent content that would hook us and reel us in. If we showed interest in a particular political point of view, we would be fed ever more similar content, isolating us from people with different standpoints.

Around the same time, social media companies noticed that angry posts received more views. So, the algorithms were adjusted to promote rage bait. Therefore, locked in our bubble, we would believe that most people thought like us. Anyone who didn’t was the enemy. That approach also fed the trolls, and online bullying became more prevalent as a result.

What was once a nice place to share photos became a powerful political platform filled with a mixture of hate and mindless, saccharine sludge. Then, those with money and power, and ownership of social media platforms, would manipulate this effect, pushing anything that would generate clicks and thus advertising revenue.

Serious photography was pushed out in favor of political diatribes and instantly forgettable videos of cats discovering the snow for the first time or dogs destroying a sofa. That infinite scroll kept people engaged because it taps into several psychological mechanisms. Firing off a complex array of neurotransmitters, electrical signals, and hormones, scrolling makes the brain want to keep going.

This effect is called a variable reward schedule. It’s the same mechanism behind slot machines. Our brains release dopamine in anticipation of a reward, and not just when the reward arrives. So, the “maybe the next thing will be good” feeling keeps us scrolling. Social cues such as Likes, comments, highly optimised personalised suggestions, and trending posts give micro-rewards, reinforcing each scroll. It’s effortless, and the low effort strengthens the habit-forming behavior.

It also increases FOMO, the fear of missing out. We must keep checking just in case we miss something important, like what our friends are doing. Moreover, there is no stopping point, and the human brain does not like unfinished tasks.

All the platforms are polluted with lies. That is either from individuals promoting hatred or those wishing to make money by posting AI-generated crap that is even worse than the self-promoting, mind-numbing dross that celebrities and influencers post.

A sizeable proportion of social media posts have become untrustworthy. In some cases, it is dangerous. For example, the spread of unqualified medical advice and the promotion of unsafe remedies is widespread. There are numerous famous cases of people promoting dangerous health claims. For instance, one popular influencer with 200,000 followers claimed alternative medicines had cured the brain cancer she never had. Meanwhile, others falsely claim their illnesses had been cured by ingesting diluted borax detergent.

Furthermore, the promotion of anti-vax claims on social media has led to increased rates of measles, mumps, and rubella, causing long-term debilitating conditions, including blindness, in children. During the Covid pandemic, there were numerous high-profile cases of anti-vax and anti-mask proponents who, sadly but ironically, died from the disease.

The same happens with photography, although fortunately not with fatal results.

For example, you can often read that Micro Four Thirds (MFT) cannot give a shallow depth of field. That is not true. If you put the same focal-length lens at the same f-stop on an MFT camera and a full-frame camera and focus on the same distance, the MFT lens will deliver a shallower depth of field. Contrary to many comments I read, the shutter speed stays the same, too.

It’s common for comments under articles in some photography Facebook groups to be patently untrue. Recently, someone suggested that photographers should reduce exposure when shooting in the snow to counter glare. If you are new to photography and don’t know it, you usually need to increase the exposure. That is because the camera tries to render the scene as mid-gray, which underexposes the shot. Therefore, you may need to counteract that by increasing the exposure.

There is still some good content on social media, but much of it is drowned out by brain-rotting junk. You must actively look for it, rather than seeing it appear in that bottomless pit of an Instagram feed. But many real people have stopped updating their statuses.

This poses a problem for photographers.

Because of the changes social media has brought, many photographers feel pressured to abandon posting still images. Furthermore, many well-known photographers are posting far less or even leaving social media altogether. That’s partly because of the algorithmic video‑first demands, which erode the value of carefully crafted still photography.

With so many photographers reporting that their social media reach has plummeted, what should we do now? There’s little point in creating art if we are not going to see it.

My disappointment with how mainstream social media evolved left me in a quandary. All the business training courses and seminars I attended suggested that I promote my business on social media. Now, my customers were less likely to see details of my classes and workshops through that approach.

So, I experimented. Firstly, I no longer looked at or posted to X. That was partly because I really didn’t want my business appearing alongside the fanatics shouting at one another. Like most people in the world, I don’t want to get on with my life and not be bothered with their hatred, and X is rife with that. It had never been a particularly effective promotional tool, anyway.

Abandoning X made no difference to my business.

Historically, I had success advertising my courses through Meta’s platforms, but the returns had plummeted in the last few years. Therefore, I had already stopped paying to promote them. But I then went one step further. I cut back on my posts about upcoming workshops.

My posting frequency on Instagram dropped, too. Likewise, that made no difference.

I still post to a couple of photography-based groups I set up, so I occasionally update my business page’s status. But my activity on social media has dropped by 95%.

It wasn’t reducing posting that made the most significant difference to my business. It was something more astonishing: I turned off the news feed and removed all social media apps from my phone.

I didn’t think it would make much difference; I wasn’t distracted by those apps much, was I? However, a week later, I received this notification: “You used your phone three hours less than last week.” Amazingly, the following week I received a similar notification saying my phone usage had dropped by another two hours, and nearly an hour more was saved the following week.

I had no idea how much of my time those apps were wasting.

It was liberating. Deleting them enabled me to take more photos, run my business, enjoy family life, and devote time to the voluntary roles in the community I am involved with. Furthermore, I was much happier not seeing the posts by hate-mongers and trolls.

When I do use social media, it is only on my office computer and usually just before I switch it off to have my evening meal.

Then, something strange happened. Since I’ve been spending less time on social media, I have never had so many clients.

I don’t want to stop engaging with the online world entirely. Fortunately, some platforms remained true to their photographic origins. Flickr is still a great way to display your photos, as is 500px. There is a lot to be said about having your own website and sharing your photos there as well.

RSS feeds, the tool used to feed people notifications of new blog posts, are also making a resurgence, allowing an algorithm-free experience.

I have also experimented with emerging alternative platforms. Again, I only access these on my computer. If they stay true to their founding intentions, they promise to be better than the legacy apps like Facebook and X. For example, although Bluesky looks similar to Twitter, it has less hate. Meanwhile, Vero has the potential to be a better platform for sharing genuine, high-quality content.

Then I started focusing on posting business updates to my company’s search engine accounts. With every post, I found that my website hit rate surged.

What started as a great way to keep people connected has become the opiate of the masses. Instead of uniting us, social media isolates us from reality. I was shocked by how much time I saved by removing their apps from my phone. Historically, I always avoided watching soap operas because I considered them a waste of my life. Therefore, I am also slightly annoyed with myself for unknowingly letting that nonsense take up so much of my time. But I am more pleased with the improvements abandoning them has brought.

They say that when we die, our lives flash in front of our eyes. I wonder how many of us will see ourselves living our lives by proxy when that happens. Instead of seeing us experience real things, will a significant proportion of that fleeting moment reveal that we were staring at instantly forgettable, low-quality reels on our phones? I would rather have memories of sitting in a bird hide photographing golden eagles in Finland, standing by my tripod on a windswept beach and watching the sunrise, or teaching someone how to use their camera. That is certainly better for my business.