At the eve of the Tour de France 2025 , here we are again. Me and my neverending dilemma of using images on social media or not.
I’m a writer, a literary critic, a trained journalist.
My world is the written world.
I have the natural desire to be read by as many people as possible. (Exept when it comes to sreen-, or playwriting, of course, and this desire modifies itself to see how actors bring to life my words. But at the end, it’s still about how a special group of people read my texts.)
Also, I use social media for only one reason: trying to get as many people as possible to visit my websites and read my texts. Even those random thoughts people usually sharing on social media (for example first, quick impression of something they just saw on the telly), I refuse to share directly there. If you want to misunderstand me deliberately, then chastise and scolde me as a projection of your general frustration in your own little life, please, do it after you cotributing in generating traffic on my websites.
And here is the dilemma of making my article desireable to visit by using interesting images on social media. I mean,
it’s a classic catch-22 situation.
I share an exciting story from the heyday of road cycling with putting an attention-grabbing vintage black&withe image in the thumbnail of the post, that really attract people. But they are usually satisfied to give a like to my social media post because of the image, without visiting the website to read what I originally intended to share: my text. If, on the other hand, I create a thumbnail including only the title of my article (even with a f*cking big “click here to read” button), people are just scrolling over my sharings, and the result is the same. They don’t visit my website.
Now, from the most rational marketing reasons, it would be still worth to share images and being happy about the level of engagement of the users, becsuse that could help to reach even more people, and maybe some of them would be willing to read my stuff.
But I just don’t want it. I’m so disgusted hy this habit of paying attention to images only, that I refuse to be part of this game. Even when it is less profitable to me.
(Note: of course, I’m too thinking constantly about what use I could have of AI generated pictures or even videos, but that’s just a totally different situation than the sheer dilemma about what kind of thumbnail would be more desirable to get more visitors, and even more possible readers. Yes, the two are not the same.)