45 million readers: On Offbeat Bride’s 10th anniversary + what we’re working on now
As of last week, Offbeat Bride is now a DECADE OLD. It’s still one of the biggest ironies ever for me that the website was launched just as a way to promote the book that was supposed to finally launch me into what I imagined as “real success.” In 2007, digital publishing was still the less-respected nerdy little sibling of the “real” publishing industry, and being a published author was going to be my big ticket to legitimacy and recognition.
…Har har! Joke was on me!
4 reasons I love Instagram Stories
Yesterday I posted on Offbeat Empire’s Facebook page about how, if folks want to follow along with me behind the scenes, they should follow @offbeatbride’s Instagram Stories. A couple commenters were like, “But wait I don’t use Instagram, how can I see that content?” and the answer is…
…you can’t.
And here’s more about why.
How Facebook algorithms and a stupid post about cranky wine relate to the election
Around 9am last Thursday, Megan regrammed a silly Instagram picture of these bottles of amusingly-named wine. This set off an insane chain of events that resulted in, five days later, 13 million people seeing this piece of content.
Put another way, the weekend before one of the most divisive presidential elections in US history, the robots that serve America our information decided that what 13 million of us really needed to see was a throw-away post about wine labels that said “FUCK” on them.
For me as a publisher, this was an insane content marketing story to watch unfold. Come with me on this journey as I unpack what it says about the media, the work of my editors, my company, and even the American election.
Instagram and the shifting social media landscape
This past year, I’ve been fascinated by the growing influence of Instagram. Of course Offbeat Bride has been on Instagram for years, but it’s always been a relatively small following — we’re talking 17k Instagram followers as compared to 155k on Facebook. Let’s talk more about what this means for biz dev…