A question we get asked time and time again, why is Motion six not on any social media sites? We had a Facebook, which was closed two years ago and a twitter that was closed few months back. Motion Six is currently on no networking websites and this always seems to surprise people. “Well, it’s a good marketing opportunity,” ” It’s a good way to connect with people,” “You’re missing out!” These are just some responses we get. People don’t seem to understand why we choose not to be on social media so we’ve written this post to provide some enlightenment on our views about social media!
It’s exhausting
Social media provides a barrage of information, comments and messages from all over the place. Keeping up with all this is extremely taxing and exhausting and has a negative impacts on the products we provide. Because we are a very small team, someone has to attend to the account profiles and keep them updated costing us money to do so. Because we build each order by hand, they get delayed or rushed out the door. So mid 2015 we decided to hell with it. We would rather put that energy and effort into building better an new products then keep posting useless Facebook and twitter posts.
It connects us with the wrong people
Individuals we encountered on social media were people who were…. well idiots. We found through our social media accounts that we attracted more “Pretentious” filmmaker than “Actual” filmmakers and photographers alike. These are people who write blog posts (oh the irony!) reviewing the latest gear or doing Youtube reviews, just so they can get views on their posts, or channel. These people never actually create any art, they just review the latest “Gear.” If you don’t create anything, how do you know a tool is good? It gets to a point where these idiots are just reviewing stuff based on hype. If something gets positive buzz then the product is awesome, if the product receives negative buzz then the product is rubbish regardless of the product’s merits. These people are complete tools and we want nothing to do with them! There are a lot of blogs who do this and it’s not necessarily bad but reviewing the latest or upcoming gear does not add to the art.
It’s not actually “Marketing”
If you’re a freelance filmmaker or a photographer, how many people have hired you through your Facebook or Twitter account? For most, it will be none or if you’re very good at communicating it will be a few. It’s a common misconception that social media is a extremely good marketing tool, this ideology is mainly pushed by Facebook and Twitter itself so they can generate more advertising revenue. We’ve never paid for advertising, nor are we ever going to as it is completely pointless. Try it for yourself, pay for your Twitter and Facebook post to be featured and see how many jobs you can get. Chances are none.
Yes, social media has a lot people connecting with each other and yes its a huge environment. However, in our view (as mentioned above) these are the wrong type of people we would want our products getting in the hands of. Marketing involves connecting with the right people, social media does not allow us to do that. For us, it does the complete opposite.
We like having a close-knit user group
We like to keep our user base super low. Why, you may ask? We don’t want our lenses to be overused. We want our users to get a look that is not attainable with a lot of other camera lenses or with very expensive one. When all digital video looks exactly the same, we want our products to stand out when used correctly, they’re not exactly going to stand out if everyone is using them, right? It’s this small user group that makes our products really unique. If we heavily marketed our products, yes there will be a lot more users, it will also mean that a lot more artists using our products. As idiotic as it may sound, we don’t want that.
So these are just a few reasons why we choose not to be on social media. Of course there are a few more reason which we may cover in a future post. It is a popular misconception that social media is good for communicating and marketing to new users, however this is a completely erroneous conception fabricated to benefit the big companies. If you think about, most people on social media are just there to kill time, they aren’t interested on hiring someone or share someone else’s work.