Social Media for the Creative Entrepreneur: Exposure, Tips, and Pros & Cons
Peggy Dean · Top Teacher | The Pigeon Letters
A creative-business owner who built 250,000 followers walks through the mindset and hashtag mechanics behind that growth, though little of it is new.
A pep talk with a hashtag guide attached
Peggy Dean built her brand, The Pigeon Letters, largely on Instagram, and this course is framed as a distillation of what worked and what hurt along the way. The arc is straightforward: open with the downsides of running a business on social media, pivot to the upsides, spend the middle stretch on hashtags and posting mechanics, then close with a segment on mental health. Forty-three minutes covers a lot of emotional ground but not much technical depth, and the course reads more like an experienced practitioner's checklist than a structured curriculum.
The cons segment is the most grounded part of the course. Dean names specific friction points: the algorithm burying posts from accounts outside a follower's "friends and family" circle, the risk of being tagged with captions you didn't write, and a real incident where a virtual assistant forgot to credit an artist on a repost account, triggering a wave of angry messages. That story does real work, because it shows a consequence rather than just warning about one. The pros segment is thinner, mostly restating that social media is free, builds brand awareness, and rewards responsiveness, without much that a beginner wouldn't already assume.
The hashtag material is the closest thing to a technical core. Dean draws a line between universal hashtags (tutorial Tuesday) and specific ones (how to draw flowers), and recommends checking a company's bio for their preferred branded hashtag before trying to get their attention. The giveaway tactic stands out: instead of asking entrants to repost the same graphic, she had participants repost a different image from her feed along with what they learned, tagged with a custom hashtag. That produced varied content across many accounts rather than one repeated image, and the hashtag itself outlived the campaign. It's a genuinely reusable idea, though it only gets a couple of minutes of attention before the course moves on.
Everything after that thins out. The "DOs and DON'Ts" and "Best Practices" lessons list familiar advice (write engaging captions, respond to comments, avoid hijacking trending hashtags) without much that separates it from any general social media primer written in the last several years. The Instagram insights walkthrough describing impressions, reach, and the discovery tab is useful but tied entirely to one platform's interface at one point in time, and app UIs date fast.
The mental health section is where the course earns some credit for candor. Dean shares actual negative comments she has received and describes the comparison spiral of watching curated feeds and feeling inadequate by contrast. It doesn't offer techniques so much as reassurance and a reminder that a feed represents someone's edited best moments, not their whole life. That's honest and worth including, but it functions more as encouragement than instruction.
The bundled 40-page hashtag ebook and worksheet add some project value beyond the video itself. Overall the course suits someone just starting to think seriously about social media for a creative business, delivered with warmth and specific personal anecdotes, but anyone past the basics will find little that pushes their strategy forward.
The standout
The giveaway structure that asks entrants to repost a different image each, so the campaign avoids repetitive content while still spreading through a branded hashtag.
What you will learn
- How to weigh the real pros and cons of running a business on social platforms, including the algorithm problem and loss of control over how you're tagged or shared
- A practical time budget for social media (about 10 minutes per platform per day) to avoid the scrolling trap
- How to choose and combine universal and specific hashtags, plus which hashtag habits read as spammy
- A giveaway format that multiplies reach by having each entrant post a different image with a unique branded hashtag
- How to read Instagram's built-in post insights (impressions, reach, discovery) to judge whether hashtags are working
- A framework of nine questions to check whether a post is worth publishing before it goes up
Best for: A solo creative entrepreneur early in building a personal brand who wants a broad, encouraging orientation to social media strategy and hashtag basics.
Skip it if: Anyone who already runs paid social campaigns, tracks analytics beyond native app insights, or has read a handful of hashtag guides before, since the tactics rarely go past beginner level.