You are Not Alone, Social Media Marketing Can be a Struggle
When I tell folks that I’m a marketing coach and can help business owners with their social media, they have strong emotions. I usually hear “I hate social media” - I heard this statement so many times, spoken in different phrases. The last thing I want to do is convince someone to use social media all the time so it consumes them. I’ve had my own challenges with social media…..
Let me share a story - flashback to summer of 2017. I was pretty active on Facebook, but I wasn't understanding Instagram, but I was determined to! I wanted to push my web design business at the time. I would wake up, and the first thing I do is I spend time on Instagram, and then the rest of the day would feel horrible. This happened again and again and finally, after about 6 weeks, I realized it's not a healthy way to wake up. You shouldn't look at these perfect pictures of people and is not a very healthy way to start your day, nor is it very productive.
Once I had this awareness, I stopped checking Instagram first thing in the morning and took a long break from it altogether. I started evaluating other habits that would be more fruitful for me. When I started getting off Instagram and even reduced my Facebook engagement, I noticed I felt better. I wasn’t obsessing about things, thinking about what I was doing wrong or helped curb my FOMO a bit.
I started studying what other people recommend for habits and a Zen blogger I subscribed to recommending even deleting social media apps on the weekends. The rule is to only open them back up for a specific reason, you can reinstall them for a purpose. I've done that a lot with Facebook to only use it for certain specific reasons.
There’s also the SCROLLING ISSUE. There’s this rabbit hole effect if you scroll and scroll. It’s like eating a big bag of potato chips (or if you are me, Cheetos!) First you get 1 or 2 chips and say these are really delicious. I'm gonna have some more and then it's just like scrolling, you say to yourself, just five more minutes, maybe I will see something amazing. So you keep eating the chips (or scrolling) and all sudden the bag is empty and you're like, oh god, how did this happen! It’s the same kind of gross feeling of scrolling for 20-60 minutes and you feel gross and want to throw up. It comes from seeing all these different emotions and posts, you have NO CONTROL over and you are reacting to some very emotional opinions or events in someone’s life. How many of you can relate to that?
I’ve been active on LinkedIn and studying it since 2019. I realized that if I am intentional about who I want to seek out and talk to there, I'm going to have more of the interactions that I want. I think a lot of people hop on LinkedIn or Instagram and scroll. But no, you don’t have to do that! You can create a list of people, and engage with them, and even create a link so you can see their posts.
This way you can shower them with love and give them awesome comments to let them know that you care about what they're saying or sharing what they're promoting. That's really where the engagement is. Stop mindlessly scrolling, it’s a time-waster. Take it from someone who was guilty as charged.
Want to work through and build a plan to tackle your social media? Try out my Marketing Sprints. Don’t know where to start on social media and need help? I’ll provide you with a calendar to help schedule your posts, a template with writing prompts and ways to reuse content. We have a full hour where I review all of this with you and get you to hit the ground running!