CamLife Magazine
7 veils social media year in review
There have been so many changes this year in social media. You are probably sick of hearing about all the crisis and rumors and “fake news” about social. Let’s go over what really happened this year:
Tumblr
This was the big one that rocked the adult industry at the end of 2018. In December, Tumblr announced they would no longer allow NSFW content on their platform and would remove all existing adult content. As we discovered, removed meant freeze accounts so they can’t post anything. This was a pretty devastating blow for a lot of people in the adult industry. Tumblr had been a playground for the adult industry for a long time, but also for the LGBTQ community, and sex educators. This is a big loss not just for promotional capabilities but for the overall sense of community.
Reddit has been the little engine that could. This year we really saw Reddit start to step out as a leader for driving traffic in the adult. Their big change? They updated their UI(user interface). A lot of people say it is more user-friendly, personally, I still prefer the slightly less user-friendly original version. But maybe I am just stuck in my ways.
Snapchat
Snapchat rolled out a big feature and user interface update late summer and WOW did everyone hates it. In fact, everyone hated it so much Snapchat decided to get rid of most of their changes. In October, they added, “Snap Cameras” which was an application that allows people to use Snapchat lenses from their desktop and it was so popular that you likely haven’t heard about it and no one is really using it. They added the ability to tag products in your posts, but since you can’t sell anything for your camshow or for adult, it doesn’t really help our industry that much. but Amazon thinks it is the bee’s knees. So other than their one big update that everyone hated, Snapchat just keeps snapping. It continues to be a good source for performers and some performers are saying they are making more money with their Snaps than on other income generating platforms.
Oh Twitter, how I love and hate you. Twitter had a lot of changes over the past year, but the biggest one was the big summer purge of 2018! It was the biggest purge of fake, bot, or inactive accounts, in Twitter’s history. Some people’s accounts lost tens of thousands of followers overnight because of this purge. Though they were purging all year and continued well into the fall, this big one started in July and definitely caused some panic. The good thing is that the accounts that are left are far more likely to be real. The bad news is that because of this big bot purge, Twitter cut way back on the kind of automation that has been allowed. A lot of people started getting their accounts hidden in search, aka. Shadowbanned, because of too much automation and Twitter suspecting they were bots.
The shadowban issue continued to be an issue, though technically it was one that started in 2017. Most people were not shadowbanned but rather were marked as sensitive. If you didn’t have your “show sensitive content in search” checked, then you wouldn’t be able to find yourself in search. Thankfully, most of the panic from that has subsided.
Beyond that, Twitter made a few small UI changes that were positive and small enough that most people didn’t really notice. The network continues to plug away and be a good source of traffic for adult entertainment.
I don’t know what to tell you except that Facebook hates adult. This year they made a change that says they hate all businesses that aren’t buying ads. At the beginning of the year, they announced that they were reducing the number of pages being shown in the newsfeed by another 20%. So the little bit your posts were actually seen in the newsfeed just became even less. Facebook continues to be a pay for play platform. They want you to buy ads and we can’t buy ads.
Instagram is much like Facebook in hating adult, however, performers often do very well on this platform. This fall they seemed to start cracking down on adult accounts as we were seeing a lot of reports of people having their accounts shut down. Their biggest change was in the last week of December where they rolled out horizontal scrolling…everyone hated it. They claim it was just a test, so let’s see if the test failed and they went back to the old style newsfeed.
They have a few other changes that have happened, like changing some elements of your profile to de-emphasize followers, allowing you to add alternative descriptions to photos, and making voice messages in DMs. These are all small and not a lot of people have them rolled out yet. There are some rumors about Instagram creating special analytics for influencer accounts, but we don’t have much information about that just yet.
Resolutions for 2019
If you are not on Reddit, get on Reddit! Create a backup Instagram account in case yours get shut down. Keep tweeting because Twitter still loves you.
The social media market is getting more competitive as every year goes by. People are getting savvier and the networks are getting more flooded. Our advice, pick a few networks that you like and are good at doing. Do them daily and do them well. Hire someone to help you do your marketing posts so you can make some money and drive some traffic from your social media. If you need any help, contact alex@7veils.com, we would love to talk to you about your social media.
Lauren MacEwen is the CEO and founder of 7 Veils Media. 7 Veils are the premier social media solutions company in the adult industry. Follow them on twitter @7_Veils, Instagram: @7veils, or Facebook.com/7veils. You can visit their site at 7veils.com
