World of Moose: How Twitter Helped My Creativity
Moose Allain, also known as World of Moose, has created a pretty awesome Twitter following of over 90k. We recently had the opportunity to chat with Moose on his success and what suggestions he had for creating an online social presence.
Flamingos
“…it was a lightbulb moment when I realised it was actually making me more creative rather than distracting me from work.”
World of Moose: Twitter is a great place to show your work in whatever medium, but you can’t just sit there hoping people will discover your genius, you need to interact with people, and that doesn’t mean saying “Hey, look at my stuff, please retweet it!”. I think you just need to be friendly and interested and hopefully, you’ll make friends and gather interest. I joined in 2009, it took me about a year to get to 100 followers and nearly 10 years later I’m around 90k. A lot of hard work went into that, I tell you! Seriously though, it was a lightbulb moment when I realised it was actually making me more creative rather than distracting me from work.
My approach has been:
- Find interesting people to follow, talk to them.
- Be entertaining, engage with people in a warm and friendly way
- Share other people’s work – and anything else you find interesting. Maybe they’ll share yours in return
- Get the balance between ‘selling’ and providing ‘free content’ (ugh – horrible phrase!). I’m probably 95% the latter. Selling is a by-product of my twitter, not the point of it.
“I’ve met lots of great people through Twitter, some have become good real-life friends…”
I’ve met lots of great people through Twitter, some have become good real-life friends. I’ve had all sorts of commissions, collaborations and odd job offers, including doing a bit of stand up comedy! For several years I’ve been working with a local filmmaker, John Panton (Meat Bingo), on various projects, a particular highlight was a commission for John and me to create a video for the rock group Elbow’s ‘Lost Worker Bee’ song.
One of my favourite things is starting a ‘thread’ (lots of people replying to a tweet on a theme). Some highlights have included family games, slips of the tongue and online shopping accidents. The slips of the tongue thread literally had me in tears of laughter, I could hardly breathe. It reminds you that there are a lot of interesting, brilliant, funny strangers out there and Twitter is a great place to meet them.
Do you have tips on social media success? Share with our artist community in the comments below
