Hello lovely people! Today is a very hot day in Manchester (a true rarity) and I’m lucky enough to have a garden so I can sit out in the sun to read and write. We set up an Instagram for our blog around 18 months ago now and I am truly so glad we did. I personally really like Instagram the most out of all the social media platforms out there. I find it to be the most positive, which is heavily down to who you choose to follow, and I enjoy that is is so visual. I’ve been thinking a bit about bookstagram lately and wanted to write my thoughts down.
We spent a long time planning before setting up a bookstagram. This is because me and Sarah both like to know what we are doing before we jump into something and I made sure to plan posts for us rather than just setting it up on a whim and then becoming overwhelmed with not keeping up with it. I’m super glad we did this! Of course, we have had moments particularly last year where we weren’t as active on it. However, this year we have been pretty inspired and have posted much more frequently and posted things we love and enjoy.
I have found some brilliant accounts and blogs through Instagram and there are so many lovely people in the bookstagram community on there! On the whole, people are supportive and engaging, happy to chat to new people and interact with various people. This is something I adore and as someone who loves meeting and speaking to new people it makes me very happy. Now I have a healthier relationship with social media generally, I enjoy chatting more to others on the blog accounts, be that Instagram or Twitter. I used to have a bad relationship with social media and felt unhappy whenever I used it which led to me having a few months where I was lowkey off the grid. I’m very glad I did take this break however as I learned how to make boundaries and ways to help cut out negativity and things that can affect my mental health for the worse.
I’ve chatted to a few people about my thoughts on bookstagram and was pleasantly surprised to find that a few people had similar thoughts they hadn’t really spoken about. So many of us love bookstagram because it is such a wonderful community on the whole and it is filled with beautiful posts that I am inspired by, be they from an account with tens of thousands of followers or one with a hundred followers. I think it can be easy however to be sucked into the numbers game, comparing your account to others with more followers, particularly when certain parts of bookstagram can be quite cliquey and not so open to newer people or those who aren’t in certain circles.
I’m not personally too focused on numbers – of course, it’s nice to grow your audience, I won’t sit here and deny that because it wouldn’t be genuine. However the main reason it’s nice is because it’s a way of discovering new people in the community, new voices and new creative posts that you may not have seen before. It also means people enjoy your content and want to see more of what you create which is so exciting!
I think sometimes there needs to be more importance placed on this as opposed to just solely thinking about the numbers. Sure, some of our posts don’t do as well as others for various reasons – maybe the photography isn’t as great, the book pictured is less popular – it can be a whole host of reasons! I love doing flatlays yet they often aren’t the most popular kind of post but I’m not about to stop! I love creating a flatlay based on a specific book as it feeds my creative spirit and I take them because I like them.
I love bookstagram a lot, I just think it’s important to be mindful of not being cliquey and not making others feel lesser or looking down at others because they have a small amount of followers. Bookstagram can be filled with kindness and friendly people – I think for me it’s just important to make sure I’m surrounding myself with those people, both online and offline.
Leave your bookstagram handle in the comments – ours can be found here! We love finding new accounts to follow!
The Little Contemporary Corner 