Dear Etiquetteer:
Here’s my predicament: So many businesses invest heavily in selling sex appeal, and I have fallen into online popularity by sex appeal through utter chance and circumstance.
Over the last few months, gay men seem to have found me, especially on Instagram, and the growth and engagement with my business account, which is my only account on that platform, have consequently evolved into the algorithm such that this seems to be the only demographic now consistently served my content.
I appreciate the growth, in terms of bare numbers, but this audience has so far not converted into any paying customers. Yet they flood my inbox with up to hundreds of often quite rude messages per day, replying to which consumes a lot of time, sorting and culling for messages of actual salience to my work. This says nothing of the sometimes overtly graphic public comments that have begun to appear on some of my posts, too.
I’m working with my team to develop a strategic social media marketing plan for this year, and I am quietly asking individuals in DMs to kindly cool down overly hot comments.
However, do you suggest any sort of public address or messaging to diplomatically and effectively redirect lusty over-enthusiasm to more productive engagement, that will be more comfortable for everyone in my audience? Thanks, sir, for your thoughts and wisdom on this!
Dear Besieged:
Attention is oxygen online. Withhold your attention from these Senders of Unwelcome Messages —starve them — and they’ll fall away. For those of us taught to reply to every bit of correspondence, this is quite an adjustment. But repeatedly leaving someone “on read” (meaning that they can see you have seen their message, and that you haven’t responded) sends a message without sending a message.
Depending on your tolerance, for first offenders you may wish to respond “Thanks, but is my business account, and my business is not to be beautiful, but to [Insert Business Here]. I’d much rather engage with you only about that.” Inappropriate comments on a public post should be deleted; you may or may not wish to warn repeat offenders.
And for those who can’t take the hint, Etiquetteer has no qualms at all about blocking. As Humphrey Bogart so memorably said in The Maltese Falcon, “If you want to hang around, you’ll be polite.”
Etiquetteer feels ambivalent about a public announcement to stave off this behavior, because it introduces this problem to the rest of your audience, who probably have no idea what’s going on — and shouldn’t need to. In the meantime, perhaps it will be possible to game the algorithm by commenting on the posts of others in your field, or followers in other demographics. (But Etiquetteer is admittedly nowhere near an expert on the algorithm.)
Etiquetteer wishes you and your marketing team successful engagement with your true demographic: ladies and gentlemen.