I want to talk about why most things you’ve been told about social media are, quite frankly, just wrong.
This is a really important topic for me. It’s a real bugbear of mine so I’m looking forward to addressing it and debunking some myths which is something you deserve.
I want you to walk away with a really clear understanding of why some of the things you’ve been told by the “gurus” over the years aren’t true – you might be surprised at some of the things that I’m going to tell you but stick with me, please.
Social media is chaotic. It’s a busy old place online, and that can lead to a lot of stress and anxiety.
My mission in life is to rid small business owners of their stress and anxiety surrounding social media because you don’t need to have it – it doesn’t have to be part of the part of the mix. You might always feel that you’re missing your window of opportunity on social media to grow your business; get more customers; make more sales. Do you feel like if you could just share more content or post at a different time of day, then you think you might be more successful in getting customers through your Instagram or Facebook? Let me know in the comments.
How many times have you got towards the end of a day and been disappointed at how few comments you’ve got on your posts? Disappointed, despite the fact that you’ve put several posts out there and a video and added it to your stories. You’ve probably spent ages making all that content and you’ve been sharing, sharing, sharing but you feel like no one’s no one’s watching, no one cares. This thought process is what leads to panic.
When it comes to social media content and the internal panic about running your business or whether you can do this or whether you’re good enough a scattergun approach is just going to hamper your goals, not get you towards them.
I can hear you thinking, I’ve read so many articles and watched so many YouTube videos and they’ve all told me that I need to post more often so that must be true.
You might have spent time learning how to use Reels and created 30 of them to share over the over the weekend and over the next few days which took you a day out of your week to do that. You’ve been really committed to that and you want to get them all shared on your social media as soon as possible because you’ve been told that Reels get seen a lot. You’ve been told that if you share more in quick succession, it’s going to boost your followers. I know that there are some experts out there who are going to tell you to post up to ten times a day. Can you believe it? Ten times a day? I can just feel that stress sizzling under my skin, just at the thought of.
The thing is about this strategy is that it will quickly burn through your good content, your considered content, the content that builds anticipation and makes people want to buy from you. It’s like chucking it all on a bonfire in one go.
If your goal is to allow people to buy from you, build up the anticipation so that they want to buy from you. Make them desperate to buy from you. That’s your job, not to repel people, however, some of the behaviour of this multiple posting is so panic driven that that might be exactly what you’re doing – you might be inadvertently repelling people.
This whole big cycle of killing your own social media through excessive hard work is the wrong thing and it’s going to lead to you sharing a load of garbage. Stuff that no one cares about, stuff that you’re using as filler content, stuff to create to tick a box – you’ll quite simply run your content-pot dry, which we do not want.
If you think about this garbage, then imagine what it’s like for someone new, a new follower. What on earth are they going to think? It won’t help them get into the know-like-trust cycle. The journey that we all take from discovery to purchase. It’s certainly not going to do that and you want this to happen – you want them to enter into this cycle and then you help them along the way.
Also, if you’re being told by a “guru” to create enough content to post 10 times a day, how much of that time your time is that going to take up? I can’t even comprehend how much time you must be spending on your social media content.
Your priority, when it comes to your social media content is to set a path for your followers, that peaks, their interest in you and what you sell, what your business is about so that they’re ready to buy from you when the time comes.
All this crazy posting cycle is going to achieve is burnout, for you and alienation of your followers. Imagine seeing all that in your feed. No, thank you, I don’t want to do that, go away and unfollow. The fact that most people won’t actually see the majority of this content that you’ve spent all this time and effort creating because algorithms, means it’s just nothing but a self-induced stress fest.
I want you to stop doing that and take a breath. Instead of focussing on the volume of content, focus on who is actually going to see your content, who your followers are, who’s going to be seeing your content and have them in your mind. Think about your customers and stop thinking about yourself and the number of posts that you need to share.
It’s a simple yet an enormous mind-shift for you. Think about who’s actually going to be seeing the content, who you want to be seeing the content not the content itself and the creation of the content.
The number of posts that you share is not a metric that you are going to be tracking. Who cares if you’ve done 30 post in a month or 70 posted in a month? It doesn’t matter. It’s about the content itself.
- What is it that your followers want to see?
- What is it that they want to hear?
- How can your content help them?
- Does your content build anticipation for your product or service?
- Will it help them get to know you a bit more?
- Does your content expose your vulnerability and make you an engaging person that people want to work with?
Your goal is to create a community on your social media channels of the right people who will get to know, like and trust you and then have begun to become your customers because that’s how it works.
Scattergunning bucket loads of content in the hope that something sticks just it’s not going to build a community, it’s not going to do you any good and it’s just going to burn you out and you’re going to hate social media forever.
Instead of just chucking content out there, be intentional, create content that’s authentic, create content that’s from your heart and truly connect with your followers. Create a forum on your social media channels, on Facebook and Instagram to be part of your community, which is a community that you’ve created.
It’s a community that warms your followers to be ready to buy from you – what a wonderful thing that is. I want you to repeat this mantra to yourself: quality, not quantity.
If you post less but your content is considered and focuses on your customers, I promise you’re will see a big shift when you look at your insights, your data, and your bottom line. You’ll notice an increase in engagement, an increase in comments, an increase in likes and shares.
Along the way, you are also going to notice an increase in sales. Social media is a long game, we know that. You’ll also have more time; more headspace and you’ll be way less stressed. If you’re doing less what you’re doing is more strategic, it’s more considered and in line with your overall strategy.
