On Making a Substack and Finetuning Social Media Strategies

While struggling with my own social media, as a former journalist who now teaches, runs student newsrooms and works on documentaries, besides posts about my own children and occasional accomplishments, I've found the Our Town Reno multiplatform street reporting collective I coordinate has recently been gaining traction. This includes an Instagram page of street photography (8,000 followers and counting), to a new hyperfocused Twitter feed (topping 1,500 followers and growing steadily), to a recently launched Substack. What's been more difficult is getting more listeners for a podcast about life on the streets, which also elevates the voices of those helping out. It's always a thought process though of doability and what's the best possible value that can be offered with availability of resources, including time.

The Substack itself does take time to write, but is a valuable, more exclusive sphere of content, ripe for behind the scenes, forecasts, recaps and analysis. The newsletter style is also a different exercise than the social media writeups or the reporting itself, while also staying consistent in voice with an overall brand DNA. My conclusion is that being all over the place, inconsistent and having too many diffuse interests, while not being famous, just doesn't have much appeal on social media, while applying skills and passion to a niche undercovered subject and consistently delivering with new, serious, original content, does bring some following.