Social Media learnings

Social media is frustrating.

6 years ago, I left Google to pursue my Paperdemon business full time. Various forms of social media including videos, image posts, live streams, and tweets have been a part of my regular day to day work. But I’ve often felt like Sisyphus trying to move a boulder up a mountain. Spending hours and hours every week creating content and posting to far too many social media accounts only to have little to no material results. Exoduces happen from older platforms, and new platforms keep popping up. When I’m finally starting to grow on one channel, an algorithm changes, and I struggle to regain momentum.

Even when I had a couple of videos go viral and get 1 million views, it didn’t actually produce meaningful results.

10K target audience views > 1 million viral views

But for the first time I actually have fucking hope.

For the first time since I started promoting the PaperDemon Art RPG and Art Community on social media, I’m finally starting to see results. And it’s not just on one platform.

In the past 3 weeks I’ve gained over 300 followers on Tiktok and 250 subscribers on Youtube. πŸŽ‰πŸŽ‰πŸŽ‰

To put this in perspective, it took me 6 years to get my first 1000 Youtube subscribers. It took me 3 weeks to get the next 250 subscribers.

That’s fucking nuts.

It was not luck. I had two videos in this time period get more than 10K views. Interestingly, the video that did well on Tiktok was not the same video that did well on Youtube. I’ve also had several other videos getting more than 1K views. These views have indeed translated into more signups on PaperDemon.com. I went from an average of 3 signups a day to 9 a day.

So what changed? Why am I suddenly doing better? What is it I learned or started doing differently?

I hired an expert

The first right choice I made was hiring a social media coach.

I’ve tried throughout these past several years to create quality content myself and learn on my own. None of the articles, classes, resources I consumed were enough to help me achieve meaningful results. I also tried to delegate to experts. Over the years I’ve hired four different people at different times to either assist or be responsible for my social media. Unfortunately, none of them could deliver any meaningful impact. And it cost me a lot of money.

But on tiktok I found an expert who actually has hundreds of thousands of followers who specializes in coaching artists who want to grow their businesses on social media. I reached out for my first coaching call and it blew my mind. They were super direct telling me exactly what type of content to make and what NOT to make, how to find trending content, and how to best promote Paperdemon. A lot of it was unexpected and very different from advice I had gotten before and different from what I’d observed others do. Then I got to work and made and posted the content.

I find this model of hiring a coach particularly compelling because it’s very cost effective. I can create the content myself, which is more impactful anyway, while having the right direction to help me achieve results.

I tried Tiktok

I didn’t want to do Tiktok for all the same reasons everyone else doesn’t want to do it. There’s concerns with the ethical origins of the company, addictive design of the platform, etc. And who wants to try and invest in YET ANOTHER social media platform when you’re already investing so much time in the others. Every time my friends told me to try tiktok, I told them no. But one of my friends finally talked me into it and I opened an account around July 2024.

I actually saw growth there quite quickly. I think its a platform that rewards you for quality content even if you have a low followers/subscriber count. I went from 0 – 800 followers in 9 months.

If you find a platform where you actually make progress, then the others don’t matter and you can shift your attention to the ones that work.

You can see what I’ve been making on Tiktok here.

I created mediocre content, then kept improving

“We all have 10,000 bad drawings in us. The sooner we get them out the better.” – Walt Stanchfield.

If you’ve read any resources on social media or content marketing, you’ve probably read “content is king.” I needed to create a lot of mediocre content before I could start to create good content. I have a lot of skills as an artist but I was struggling to convey my wisdom in a way that would work well on social media. And it took me a while to get comfortable being live and in front of a camera.

But also a big struggle I had was figuring out the right type of content to make. I had done long form tutorial videos on YouTube and those tended to do better than other videos but they took a lot longer to make. For short vertical videos I tried to do art reveals and time lapses because that’s what everyone else was doing. But I didn’t have much luck there. I also experimented with other types of videos like lore, featured art from the community, and many other things people suggested to me.

My coach suggested I do tutorials instead and they perform consistently better than anything else I make. I wasn’t making those because for some reason I thought tutorials would only work for long form, not short form. And another creator in a similar space to me said tutorials don’t work as lead gens. But it turns out once again I got bad advice.

And it makes sense why I’d do better with tutorials. I’ve been making digital art for 25 years and I feel very comfortable teaching and have prior experience doing it. I kind of have a natural talent for it. And it’s high value content for my target audience.

Short form videos are the most effective way right now for me to communicate to my audience and provide quality and meaningful content. And the fact I can create and post in one day makes me more likely to finish. I still have a draft for a long form video that I’ve been working on for four months that I haven’t finished yet.

Writing my video hook/title first before writing the script helps a lot with SEO. Having the tools to know what content is trending helped, too.

i think the biggest mistake I made is I was trying to copy the content that I was seeing. I figured these other people are successful with this type of content so I should make the same content. But that didn’t work at all. My coach had a much better idea for an effective content strategy.

another thing different I’m doing is promoting the game much better in every video. Either after the intro hook or at the very end. I’ve also done some videos showing the UI. Those havent done as well but may do better after I make some website upgrades. I still have more types of content I want to experiment with.

The order of operations

  1. Research trending topics, ideally evergreen, that are relevant to my target audience. TikTok creator insights or Tubebuddy for Youtube
  2. Choose a topic to target, then write the title or hook stuffed with target topics/keywords
  3. Write a script
  4. Record
  5. Edit (ideally using a good phone app, not a desktop app)
  6. Post
  7. Repost older videos that performed poorly but were good quality with tweaks to hook, intro, outro, etc.

I’m no longer doing a content calendar. This was something I used to do but it’s not working for me at the moment.

I find that I often come up with ideas that sound great in the moment and the ideas just pile up in a graveyard and never get executed because another idea came along or my perfectionism got in the way. Currently it works best for me if I act on the idea when I have it and finish it (or mostly finish it) same day or next day and post within 24 hours.

Mental wellness

I’ve read from multiple sources over the years that the key to being successful on social media is to be “my authentic self” but actually executing on that has been a challenge for me.

A big problem was my mindset. I couldn’t show up authentically because I was too anxious and afraid to do so. Self confidence has been a struggle for me for all of my life. And unfortunately, that lack of confidence was showing through in my videos.

Earlier this year I made some big changes in my personal life and I restarted my Miracle Morning self care routine. These changes helped me do a complete 180 on my self confidence and mindset. Visualization through journaling has been the most effective technique I’ve been using. Most days I journal using prompts related to healing, manifesting, self confidence, and visualizing the future.

This primes me to have the confidence to show up in my videos.

Investing the Time

Another huge factor was the time commitment. To do quality short form videos it takes me anywhere from 3 to 8 hours total to do SEO topic research, draft a script, record, edit, and post (and repost to other socials). Art tutorials are on the longer end. And if I recall correctly, this 23K views video took me a whole day. I’m currently posting 3 per week but my goal is to work my way up to one per day per my coach’s recommendations. Realistically I can only do that if I figure out a way to make content faster or effectively reuse old content.

Because of my family responsibilities, I struggled to find the time to dedicate to this alongside my other time sensitive responsibilities. I was providing part time childcare for my son and also had frequent interruptions throughout the day for family obligations. I now have reliable child care Monday through Friday, I’ve recently found myself with a lot more time to work and dedicate to the business and keep up with the demanding social media schedule.

And the more content I create, the faster I can fail and the more I learn.

I’ll keep going and see where this leads.

I have more I could say on the topic but I’ve got to get back to manifesting. If you find this interesting, let me know and I’ll write more.

Back to livestreaming and youtube

I’ve just published a new video where I cover 10 steps pro artists use in their art process to create professional art.

10 steps pro artists use to create amazing art

This is a condensed version of a Livestream I hosted a few weeks back.

After nearly a year of no streaming or videos I decided to come back to livestreaming.

I originally stopped for a few reasons. I found the process of creating YouTube videos quite time consuming to make them at the quality I really wanted them to be.

Livestreaming was a bit of a mixed bag. When I did “chill streams” where I just hung out and did art, I felt it didn’t really provide value to the PaperDemon community so I ended up not promoting the streams, this getting very poor engagement. I also found it was not so great for my anxiety because I was needing to be social, rather than having planned content to talk about.

When I did educational Livestream I felt more comfortable because I planned the content ahead of time and was confident that the content was valuable educational art content. But doing these streams regularly was also time consuming due to the planning involved.

Interestingly I found that even though I hadn’t posted to YouTube for a long time, we were still getting new signups to paperdemon and the discord from these videos compared to our other social media marketing efforts.

I think this is because the content is more valuable and more evergreen. On twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, posts typically only get seen for a day or two, then are forgotten about. But content on YouTube is continually searched and discovered even years later.

Because of this I decided to come back to livestreaming and YouTube videos in an effort to market PaperDemon.

But to be more realistic I’m only planning on one Livestream per month with quality educational material and demos along with an occasional extra video here and there. This is a pace that feels reasonable to me.

I’m also experimenting with YouTube shorts to share shorter advice stuff.

I may have to take another break when the baby comes but we’ll see. I may be itching to do videos. Livestreaming might be hard to coordinate around feeding and nap time.

I decided to stream on YouTube going forward instead of twitch because I’ve heard so much from the experts in this space that twitch has poor “discoverability” compared to YouTube. Plus it makes things so much easier. If people subscribe to my stream, they’re also subbed to my videos and vice versa.

My next stream will be this Saturday 11am pst and I’ll be talking about composition, a topic requested by a member of the PaperDemon community.

Discord icon

My passion for PaperDemon comes from the pain I felt as a child, not really fitting in, feeling stupid, and having poor self esteem. With the discord server we can really provide support for those that are struggling and help members to see themselves more positively. The community is so wonderfully supportive and I want to grow it further.

We’re getting a lot of new sign ups on the PaperDemon website but a small percentage of them are in the discord server.

So to solve this I want to promote paperdemons discord server more prominently on the homepage. Since the icon will sit alongside all of our other major game icons, I wanted it to match the PaperDemon art rpg look and feel (fantasy and steampunk) so I created this icon. I thought it turned out pretty good.

Re-Branding

Branding is an important area for any business but especially for an online business. Your business logo is often the first thing new customers see and what they will use to form their first impression of your business. While your icon helps existing customers recognize and attribute your content and posts.

Last year I decided to rebrand PaperDemon.com because I was unhappy with what we had. Our existing logos and icons lacked personality, didn’t meet various practical needs and didn’t communicate what we were about.

Typographical logo

Up until circa 2019, the logo looked something like this and we used this for 10 years. The typeface was very thin which didn’t show up well on small sizes and it also lacked a lot of personality and character.

Circa 2009 logo

Temporarily I had changed it to this hand lettered logo in some places but it still lacked a lot of personality and was missing the wing.

2019 logo

Today’s tech world is full of forgettable logos. So often I see companies following modern trends and just copying what the big boys like Google and Apple do without doing anything unique or special.

I knew I didn’t want to make the same mistake. I intentionally wanted to do something different. The thought of reaching out to a design agency didn’t sound attractive because with the budget I am on I knew I’d get something forgettable. Even the experienced and pricey agencies may not be able to get me something that would work given that graphic design and illustration are wholely separate skills and what I wanted was something that required the skills of an illustrator.

Good thing I know someone who has experience with both (haha, I mean me). But, in all seriousness, while branding is not by any means my area of expertise I did get some experience in this area while I worked at Google and I felt confident if I focused on it I could come up with something.

I wanted to do something that was more akin to our 2005 logo which was also hand lettered. I liked the character and feel of it, but as you can see below it lacked balance. What the heck are those shapes hanging off of the P and the D? You can see this logo like the new one you’re about to see also uses Celtic letters.

2005 logo

Using an existing font and just making a logo out of that was NOT going to cut it. We are an art and writing community after all. Our logo has to be one of a kind and artsy. There’s no way I would be able to find a typeface that would do what I wanted it to do. So I knew going into this rebrand that I would be hand lettering this thing.

Some of the keywords I wanted my logo to evoke were paper, story book, fantasy, and fairy tale. Having a list of words of what you want your brand to evoke can help guide the creative process.

My inspiration for it was Celtic illuminated manuscripts, Celtic knots, and the title cards for early animated Disney films (think Pinocchio and Sleeping Beauty).

We also use a Celtic font and Celtic knots for some of our other marketing imagery so going this direction also makes things feel more cohesive.

I also wanted the wing to become a part of the logo again, much like it was in the 2009 version. I also wanted the letters to have a worn out look to have a visual connection to “paper”. This was something I did for the lettering I had done for the 2020 Red Curtain Erotic Fantasy calendar project and I had liked the results so I decided to carry over those elements. If you look closely, you can see little notches in the letters.

PaperDemon.com 2020 logo horizontal

I am SUPER happy with the results of this. I fully intend to keep this logo for a while.

The only down side is, again, this logo doesn’t look the greatest at small sizes because of how detailed it is. I do have a simplified variant of it though, scaled smaller here for demonstration purposes

PaperDemon.com 2020 logo simplified version for small sizes

Social icon rebrand

In addition to rebranding the typographical logo, I also updated the social icons.

What I had previously was the wing from the 2009 logo colored green and on a green background with foliage textures. It’s something that I had created somewhat quickly back when we first created our social channels and it wasn’t very high resolution. This made it difficult to use in print marketing materials.

Circa 2015 social icon

I felt the demon wing concept was really strong as a brand element. It is simple enough that it scales down to small sizes well, is memorable, and relates well to the name “PaperDemon”. So I carried over this concept to the new icons.

Here’s the updated one using the new wing which was designed with the new typographical logo. I’m not completely happy with the colors so I might change the colors/textures again later this year. But the overall shape of it is pleasing.

2020 PaperDemon Icon

Site footer

For many years, PaperDemon.com had a demon illustration in the footer along with the logo for the site. This illustration would get rotated out with a new one every now and then. Over the years, this tradition was stopped due in part to my artist block, my time constraints, and also due to complexities involved with making the site layout work well on mobile.

I’ve had a strong desire for years to bring this tradition back and with the launch of the new logo, decided now was a great time to do it. I also had a great demon illustration I had created recently that made for a good fit. So this is the new footer that now resides on the bottom of PaperDemon.com. The advantage is I can make the illustration and the logo pretty large to show off it’s detail because it appears in the site footer as opposed to the header where it might be annoying for users to scroll past constantly.

I hope this post inspired you to thoughtfully consider your branding for your own business or website.