Canva Hell
Social media is competitive.
Read that again: social media is competitive.
You think that if you just get your business running, get word of mouth out there, and then just post what’s happening, you’ll get traction. That the business will speak for itself, and the people who love your offerings will follow you, promote you, and your social media accounts will grow “organically”.
Once upon a time, that was somewhat true. Now, it is a recipe for failure.
Social media is competitive. It’s not an extension of your business, it’s its own complete business. If you’re good, you can get away with treating it like a separate department. If you’re smart, you outsource it. If you’re not smart and not good, you end up like the subject of this article.
The Boardroom was a bar in Covington that closed in late 2023. I don’t know why they closed, I simply came across them while looking for musician-oriented venues to peddle my wares to. I did take one look at their social media, and instantly understood that whatever events brought about their closure, any effort they put into SM (and they did put in some) was a compete waste, and didn’t help at all.
When I first had socials management avaliable as a spec bounty (still technically do as I write this, email me), I coined the term “Canva Hell”. Canva Hell is an interesting phenomenon that occurs when a business owner recognizes the potential value of social media, recognizes the danger of spending too much time and money on social media, and tries to thread the needle by getting a Canva/Publisher/InDesign account and posting a bunch of information and graphics on top of stock images (maybe they paid a guy $25 to take some photos once, maybe they just used their phone), talking about their Tuesday specials, or their upcoming seminar, or business hours, or whatever. Instead of (or in addition to) simply having a webpage with a schedule on it, small business owners constantly post text updates as images, formatted to the bare minimum of what counts as an image, and hope that by constantly posting, they’ll gain traction. They end up trying to use their social media as an announcements board.
That’s not how that works, it’s actually a recipe for disaster. If you look at what The Boardroom did, you’ll see that it fits this bill perfectly. Literally the same pictures, over and over again (this one was even worse: the announcements were placed in the captions instead of on the images). The owner (I’m assuming there was no social media manager, because if there was they should have been fired) treated Instagram like it was a corkboard on a wall at the entrance to the bar, something to tack flyers to for people (i.e. customers who already intend to pay) to glance at while they wait to be seated.
But social media is none of those things. It’s a website that people need to click to access, governed by an algorithm that judges how much each piece of content is worth based on how much time people spend looking at and interacting with it. The people, themselves, have absolutely no need, nor desire, to stare blankly at the same collage edit of the same four photos for the 40th time, because they’re not stuck in a line. They’re in a completely different digital world, and clicking back to the explore page is as easy as two taps of the thumb, available as soon as they feel the slightest lack of interest. And that’s exactly what they did here. None of those posts got more than 10 likes.
Most of those posts probably didn’t even get seen by regulars at the bar (remember, these apps track user locations as well, so if someone frequents your venue often, they should see more of your posts). Past a certain point, the algorithm which shares posts will see that yours get no interest, and will stop trying to show them to people. You essentially condemn yourself: the more uninteresting content you share, the fewer chances the algorithm gives your content in the future.
And that’s the rub. Social media is competitive. If your post is less interesting in that moment than the next one, it gets ignored. Doesn’t matter if the event it’s advertising is the coolest thing ever, your audience is looking at the post, not the event.
But what if the event is really cool? Great! Hire me or another producer to get cool footage, or make a cool ad. Something that attracts attention, and can be used to make a post which turns heads, which actually gets the viewer to pause for a second before scrolling. The algorithm tracks that, and will reward it. Good job. But whatever you do, don’t end up in Canva Hell. An image of a glass of beer, or a coffee mug, or some clip art of a guitar, or a poster made in InDesign, simply isn’t going to cut it. You’re better off putting in no effort, and sticking to word of mouth.