Sep 24, 2022
The Struggle Turning Likes to Clicks
Let’s be honest, it’s not easy to get interaction on any platform.
Likes and views are well and good, but in this day and age a lot of people use social media to promote themselves and their work. It’s almost a necessity nowadays. From Instagram to TikTok, it’s a challenge to get things off the ground. Getting views when starting out is difficult enough, but when views pick up that’s usually when you want to start trying to promote your things.
If you have an art or author site, or a shop, you try to be like “hey, here’s this thing I have that I think you’d all be interested in” and hope that people check it out. This is where you run into a problem, especially if you’re a smaller creator on any platform under even 20,000 followers. Unless you have millions of followers, you’ll notice the content you make promoting your stuff(ie: portfolios, shops, things like that) gets tons of views and likes. You might even see a comment or two that sound supportive, but that’s where it seems to stop. You see the numbers on the content and get hopeful, but then check the analytics on whatever you were promoting and you might have one or two clicks or visits.
What happened?
Why is it that these views and likes don’t transfer or translate to interaction with whatever you were promoting? It’s not like you weren’t marketing it. That was literally the whole point of making whatever post you made, to promote and market the thing it was about. It’s clearly not a “well, maybe they can’t afford whatever it is and bookmarked it”, because then there’d at least be visits to whatever it was. For a lot of smaller creators, we promote and market our work because it’s how we make income. Sure, some may have a main job and this is a side gig until it gets off the ground. But for some it’s all they have to rely on and can’t wait till it gets off the ground. So when we see the numbers on the content we make to promote our work get tons of views and likes on one platform, then the actual thing we were promoting get little to no interaction at all, it’s confusing.
Yeah, it can definitely be discouraging, but it really does lead more to confusion. You would think if people see something they like they’d think “oh, I should go check that out” and then they do. What happens though? Where does that count drop off? Why does it stop at the promotion?
Is it a mindset of “I can come back to it later”? Is it a thought of “I’ll like this to support the creator, but I can’t financially at the moment”? If it’s that last one, I get it, I’ve been there plenty of times. But why does it, more often than not, stop at likes and views?
You see all of these stories of videos people make promoting their things blowing up overnight and then going viral leading to tons of follows and purchases. Yet the reality of it is seeing that view count happen and no actual interaction. It feels fake. It feels like people just saw the video, thought “that looks cool” and liked the video or whatever, then moved on never to think of it again. Unless you have a massive following, that always seems to be the pattern.
The only other thing I can think of that could potentially contribute is a social media version of the bystander effect. People could see the creator promoting their work and getting the interaction, then think “they must have a lot of support” and like the content then move on with the assumption that others are interacting with it. This is the only other reason I can see this happening more often than not. Like with more views and likes less people are likely to interact because they assume the creator is doing well. They see the numbers and think the creator is probably getting a lot of sales when for many that’s not the case and are promoting things to make those sales happen.
Whatever it is, it certainly makes things more difficult as someone trying to gain any sort of traction outside of views and likes. Until we figure out what the problem is, we have to keep pushing and hope that people eventually interact with what we create. We have to move forward with the “if you make it, people will find it” mentality. Eventually people will. For now, we have to keep pushing.
