The Best Way to Look Back Over Your Year: Best Nine Social Media Posts for 2018

 

Do you want to know the best way to take an overview of your year? Even better, a way that’s both fun and effective?

Take a look at your best nine social media posts, such as on Instagram or Facebook over the last year and arrange them into a 3-by-3 square grid of the images, like the one above. This combination of creative and analytical energies will kinda amaze you!

Looking back over your year will give you a perspective on how you present yourself to the world.

You can stand back from the constant flow of your life and take stock of what you’d like to continue and what might best be left in the past.

• What parts did you love about your year?
• What parts had deep meaning for you?
• What parts were fun?
• Was this an accurate portrayal of all that is you?
• Are there parts of you that you don’t share and would like to focus on for the coming year?
• How would you like to change your life in the coming year?

Spending time creating posts that promote those things that are important to you could help re-focus you and make a change in your life to make it richer and fuller.

 

 

As an artist, I’m constantly posting my artwork to social media to let you know what I am working on, how you can see the works in person, and how we can celebrate together at shows and exhibits. Looking back over my social media posts, I found that I loved creating my color-filled paintings, such as “The Kiss”, shown above (see more here and here and here). No surprise there, but…

 

 

…But I also crave the clean, graphic quality of my pen and ink work, such as “Selfie, Sorta”, shown above (see more here). The pen and ink work cleansed my palate between the larger-scope paintings. The pen and ink work also often helped inform the larger projects, highlighting aspects of the paintings that I may not have noticed before. (See “Raspberry Beret” below and here.)

When visual play meets life experience…

From a visual perspective, I love the look of my paintings being interspersed with my pen-and-ink/digital pieces. But I also noticed that the same applied from an experiential perspective: I liked interspersing my painting with my pen and ink work.

 

 

“Tea Time Moment” (see more here and here) is rich with ambience and sensual triggers and looks so much better when given some breathing space, set apart from the other color-filled paintings by some graphic pen-and-ink squares.

 

“Rapunzel”, my pen-and-ink sketch of David Hockney’s etching from the Six Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm (see more here), made a nice transition between paintings, both contrasting color with black-and-white squares and point-of-view, close-up to far away to mid-range, across the top of the grid.

The rhythm of alternating color-rich, large-scale artworks and life experiences with exercises in minimalist, targeted pen and ink work and life perspective gave me the fuller and more revealing experience.

 

To determine your best social media posts, you may want to look at your posts in two ways: social effect and personal fulfillment.

To analyze your posts for the social effect, look at your best performing posts, those with the most “Likes” or other reactions and those with the most engagement, such as comments and discussions initiated by your post.

To find your best posts for social effect, you can scroll back over your posts for the past year, noting down which performed best or you can use apps that will do the legwork for you, such as the Top Nine for Instagram 2018 app, the Best Nine app, or the Planoly: Planner for Instagram app, which is what I use.

Top Nine and Best Nine will also put your images into the grid for you, and Top Nine will even put your images onto products like phone cases.

With Planoly, you will have to get the paid version to get access to those stats. However, with Planoly, you get a whole system for planning out your images before posting. That is what I mainly use Planoly for: uploading my images to the app, moving them around to where they look good and make sense, and putting my captions, hashtags, and the like into my posts. Then, I can upload to Instagram directly from the app. (This is not a paid endorsement, by the way. I just like this app!)

But I don’t just rely on the “popular vote” to determine my best posts.

I also look at my own favorites, the posts I’m most proud of, and add those into the mix. While the social favorites can help add an outside perspective, your own feelings and opinions surrounding your life take precedence. You are getting the whole story of your situation and need to bring what you learn to light for others.

 

 

“Winter’s Icy Breath” (see more here, here, and here) puts the focus on the underlying environment and movements in our lives, the subconscious and emotional activities that others do not see, but we experience and are motivated by. Social media obviously does not operate on this level much, but that does not take away from the power of these forces in our lives.

 

For my final choice for my Best Nine grid, I embrace the intersection of popular and personal favorites.

 

 

My “Raspberry Beret” piece was one of those cases, where I chose an image for my personal favorite, instead of a popular favorite. Another hand-lettering image, “March”, had “scored” higher with Likes on Instagram.

 

 

I love “March”, but it felt out of context in the grid with the other pieces. On the other hand, “Raspberry Beret” had scored almost as high and gave more visually-delivered information and emotion to my painting, “Woman in a Red Raspberry Beret” which was also in my Best Nine grid.

 

 

“Raspberry Beret” had been a creative pen and ink/digital exercise to give more information about the painting, “Woman in a Red Raspberry Beret” (see more here, here, and here). It also linked into the musical artist Prince, who passed away all too early. Working on Red Raspberry Beret was a revelation of the many references between artists and musicians and posting this piece served as a nod to and a reminder of some of the music icons who have left us recently.

In addition, “Raspberry Beret” incorporated an illustration element, the young woman, into the hand-lettering.

So, yeah, “Raspberry Beret” earned its way into my Best Nine grid.

A Visual Playground

Once you get your Best Nine images chosen, you can arrange them in a 3×3 grid of squares in an image-editing program like Adobe Photoshop, or you can use an app like Top Nine for Instagram 2018 or Best Nine.

Seeing your best posts together in a graphic setting like this brings a sense of play to reviewing your year.

• Move the images around, out of chronological order.
• Look to see where the focus of each image points. Does a face look to the left or right or up or down? What direction does the action in the photo move? You want the viewer’s eye to be directed back into the grid, not off the page.
• What color palettes look better beside each other? Which ones clash and need to be moved?
• What image deserves center stage in the middle square?
• What images should lead, across the top of your grid?
• What images make a good foundation, across the bottom of the grid?

 

 

“Wild Horses” (see more here, here, and here) ended up being my choice for center square. It’s highly active visual quality gave my 3-by-3 square grid dynamics and energy and that’s what I liked about my year. I had stretched myself by entering 2 competitions (read more about them here) and won ribbons. And I had put together a solo show and Open Studio for the first time ever (read more about that here). It was an active and boundary-busting year for me.

 

In the end, arranging the images for your Best Nine grid is just design semantics, not a crucial decision that needs to be made. And that’s what allows for the fun of playing with your best post images. You most likely won’t be able to meet the criteria of every bullet point listed above, but that’s not the point. Considering these elements and creating your Best Nine grid can renew your own experience of these images and even lead you to further and deeper understanding of them than you originally had.

And remember to hashtag your post with #bestnine and #topnine and check out everyone else’s posts at these hashtags. It’s a great way to meet other social-posters you admire.

 

Happy Best-Nine-ing and may the new year be your new BEST year!

 

Which of your posts would you choose for your Best Nine? Tell me in the comments below.