In today’s episode, I’m telling you what I do to overcome social media overwhelm… what to do when it all just feels too hard.
If you are starting to feel or have always felt that social media is just a big overwhelming mess that’s too hard, then this is going to be a really powerful and helpful episode for you.
If you use social media as one of your core marketing strategies, I would highly recommend that you read, watch or listen to this episode because we want to bring the joy and effectiveness of social media back.
Let’s dive on in!
I hear so many people saying that they want to use social media (especially Facebook, Instagram and TikTok) to grow their business, but they can’t overcome their social media overwhelm.
Their reasoning could be that they:
- Feel it’s too much
- Are an introvert
- Aren’t a social media person
- Don’t find it enriching
- Don’t view it as part of their business strategy
- Have no interest in using it
I totally understand all of those reasons. There is a big resistance to using platforms such as social media to grow a business.
The first thing I want to make clear is that you don’t have to use social media to run and grow your business.
I totally understand and appreciate that there are so many other ways to do it. It’s ONE of the ways that you can grow your business.
That being said, I see social media as such an amazing opportunity.
For a lot of people, their initial draw to social media is still there, BUT there are some things that make social media feel like it’s not nice, it’s overwhelming, and it’s too much for them.
I want us to look at this with discernment, rather than just having this all-or-nothing approach.
Just because the way that you’re using social media right now doesn’t work for, doesn’t mean that you can’t overcome that social media overwhelm. And it definitely doesn’t mean that social media is at fault.
In this episode, I’ve got four things that will help you to overcome your social media overwhelm, and help you to get clarity on how you can use social media as a business growth tool without feeling like it’s overwhelming, too hard, not working, or it’s not fit for your needs or your business.
1. Remember: Social media is social
Social media, at its core, is about connecting with other people, having fun, and meeting your audience.
A lot of people will say that they don’t want to use social media, they just want to connect with their audience… but actually, your audience is on social media looking to connect with you!
The problem is not social media itself.
It’s not what you do on social media, it’s the way that you’ve built your strategy on social media or the way that you’ve been told you have to build your strategy on social media.
Remember that social media is about connection. It’s about reaching an audience and having conversations.
It can be super fun, engaging, and a powerful sense of community.
Anyone who loved social media in its early days can feel wistful about how it used to feel.
While some things have changed in social media, that feeling and experience is absolutely still available to you.
When I jump on social media these days, I still feel like I’m connecting with my friends, acquaintances, audience and family.
I still find social media social, fun and engaging… But that’s because I have my social media strategy clear, and I remember that social media is social.
It is a social platform!
One of the ways that we can overcome our social media overwhelm is to think of it as the online equivalent of your social life.
Think about the different spaces where you show up on social media… As a business owner, your Facebook page is the equivalent of you having billboards or writing articles in magazines. It’s you putting together a compilation of short stories. It’s you walking down the street, saying hello to people, and starting a conversation about your business and what you do for a living.
What you do on your Facebook page is the equivalent of what you would do if the internet didn’t exist.
The biggest difference is that with the power of the internet, you get to do it from home, in your pyjamas, at times that work for you, reaching people all around the world.
Sometimes we underestimate how lucky we are to have this as an opportunity.
Think about trying to start your kind of business and have access to people who are interested in your work all around the world in the 80s. How on earth would you do that? You would be flying around the world having to pound the pavement.
Imagine running a seminar overseas, having done the advertising and inviting all of these people… and having three people show up.
You’ve put in money to advertise, hauled your lovely bottom all the way over to another country, booked the venue, and so much more, only to find out that people aren’t really interested. Compare that to running a free Facebook live on your Facebook page, promoting it for free, sharing it in free networking groups and Facebook communities, and having three people show up.
Think about the level of investment and disappointment that you would feel if you had to do it the old way, versus the level of investment that you’ve put in to experience that disappointment of only having three people show up to a Facebook Live.
Sooooo many people have three people show up to a Facebook live and immediately blame social media for the reason why they only had three people show up.
They immediately blame the platform and don’t recognise that that platform just saved them from spending time and money on:
- Booking flights
- Hiring a venue
- Flying to the other side of the world
- Advertising to get in front of an international audience
- Networking
- The gatekeepers they would have had to get past in order to even try promoting that free workshop/seminar/event
There’s so much power, resources and connection available to us.
I think we sometimes take it for granted.
Remember: social media is social.
The offline equivalent of what you are able to do online is going to be harder, more expensive and take more time. This is your opportunity to access your audience faster, easier and more cheaply. And, in most cases, it’s free! How cool is that!?
Now think about Facebook communities (ie. the Heart-Centred Soul-Driven Entrepreneurs Facebook group of 35,000 people). You get to go into that Facebook group every single day and share things, ask questions through the team, have conversations, and promote your products and services.
It’s as though you’re getting invited to a business networking breakfast with a ginormous audience every single day for free. This is your opportunity to get out there and network and have an amazing day! How cool is that?!
Instagram is an amazing opportunity for you to show your favourite photos of what you’re doing in real-time. Not just to your friends and family, but also to business associates and potential clients in your audience who are interested and want to know about you.
We can often just label social media as this bad advertising data-mining machine, and forget that we wouldn’t be on social media and people wouldn’t use social media if they didn’t get a benefit from it – if they didn’t enjoy the experience.
We love being able to connect with other humans.
It’s amazing being able to see photos of what people are up to and connect and have conversations with people.
Regardless of whether you’re an introvert or an extrovert, there are ways to make that experience feel joyful the way that you do with your social life in real life.
Rather than seeing it as something that has a hold over you that’s using you and sucking you dry, remember that social media is social.
It is always an option for you to opt-out if it doesn’t feel like it lights you up and it’s not something that’s fun for you. But before you run away, why not try creating and curating a social media strategy and a social media experience that does light you up? Rather than just thinking about whether social media is good or bad, why not ask the question, how can I make social media feel good for me?
That’s my first tip to overcome social media overwhelm.
2. Boundary up your time and nail those basics consistently
You need to boundary up the time that you’re investing in social media for your business.
People often come to me asking whether they should:
- Create several different Facebook groups for several different purposes
- Create a separate Facebook page for different things
- Run twelve Facebook lives in twelve days
But those things are all one-percenter additional optional add-ons to your strategy…
Are you posting every day on your Facebook page? No.
Are you paying attention to what works? No.
Are you refining how your daily posts look and feel so that they are more resonant and are snowballing your reach on Facebook? No.
Why don’t we get that sorted first before we go chasing shiny objects?
If you don’t have those foundations in place, it doesn’t matter what shiny strategies you play with. You’re not going to see the results from those strategies that other people do, because the other people have already got their basics nailed.
Nail your basics consistently.
You can do that in just 15 minutes a day.
Woman on social media in business start-up – overcome social media overwhelm
If you are someone who finds that social media is eating up hours of your day and it’s not necessarily returning on that investment, create a boundary time where you are strategic and focused on social media, and nail your basics in that time.
I have clients who drop their kids off at school, and then on their way home, they pull over at a beautiful park, park their car and do their 20 minutes of social media on their phone.
They do that because they know they will protect that time, they’ll do it every single day, they’ll be super consistent with it and do the basics and get them nailed.
The basics for you might be different basics for someone else. But for most people, there is a core foundational basic strategy (no matter what social media channel you’re using) that will do the core basics of:
- Get yourself in front of new people each day
- Connect with and strike up conversations with your audience
- Present yourself as having some information or products/services that could be of benefit to that person
Just get those basics nailed.
Boundary up that time and nail the basics.
My boundaried social media time is a 25-minute appointment with myself to be on social media every single day.
That’s where I nail my basics.
A lot of my basics being nailed are outsourced to my team now. It’s a bit of a joint effort with me and my team, but I don’t take away that 25 minutes of focus time on social media.
What I do in that 25 minutes has changed since I first started my business, but the 25 minutes hasn’t ever left me.
I’m on social media for 25 minutes a day, four to five days a week. I don’t lose that consistency.
3. Stop buying into the fear and rules that just make it hard for you
There are a couple of big ones in particular that I want to talk about.
You’ve probably heard that you shouldn’t put links in your posts on Facebook, instead, you should put them in the comments.
That is based on fear and old beliefs about what you want to do to the algorithm.
You want to trick the algorithm into giving your post more reach because it doesn’t have a link in it. However, the algorithm has been updated several times since that worked. The algorithm now also looks for the words ‘link in comments’, ‘DM me for the link’ and all versions of that.
Facebook is just as penalising to those posts that say ‘link in comments’ as it is to those that have a link in the post.
If you’re tying yourself in knots having to force your audience to go and find the dang comment that has the dang link in it, you’re making us work harder.
You are making yourself work harder and you are training the Facebook algorithm to reduce the reach of any post that you DO put a link in because it knows your audience doesn’t like that.
Instead of tying yourself in knots to try and follow these rules, what if you instead decided to train the Facebook algorithm to see that when you share links in your posts, your audience loves it and engages with it, so therefore Facebook won’t penalise you as much.
That’s what I have done.
I don’t do ‘link in comments’ in any of my posts on social media, because I don’t need to. I know that I have refined the way that I share things with links.
What happens when I promote things that have links in them is:
1. My audience really loves it. They are consistently telling Facebook that they want to see my link because they like the content I share.
2. I have enough other content coming up on my Facebook that will help snowball my reach and my algorithm on Facebook. The job of expanding my reach is not down for the link posts, it’s actually down for the other posts on social media.
3. My Facebook strategy is so much easier. I can schedule everything to my Facebook page because I don’t have to worry about posting the link in the comments on the day.
All of these rules that are built around fear of the algorithm just make you tie yourself in knots, and make your audience work harder to get the thing that you want to share with them.
That’s actually making social media feel painful instead of easy.
Wouldn’t it be better to choose an easier strategy that might not be quite as good in terms of its reach, but that you’ll nail and do consistently, and that Facebook will eventually learn your audience loves it?
Wouldn’t that be a better plan long term?
There’s also a rule that you have to start a group. That’s an old rule.
There’s one that says you need to be posting about your business on your profile rather than having a page.
These are old rules and strategies that are built on fear. They’re trying to trick the algorithm that Facebook consistently hunts down and obliterates anyway, and that ultimately just make you feel like you have social media overwhelm that you need to overcome.
I would love as part of this podcast episode for you to come to the Heart-Centred Community and tell me using #podcastaha and the episode number (306), what rules have you heard about Facebook?
In most cases, those rules are old and outdated.
They don’t work anymore. Those rules are not worth the return on investment that they might elicit for you. They’re not in line with Facebook’s terms and conditions, or it’s just not working for you. It would be better for you to just let it go than to continuously tie yourself in knots.
These rules and fear-based strategies create this all-or-nothing approach.
There’s no point posting on a Facebook page if you’re not running ads. That’s not true!
There’s no point in posting on a Facebook page because the algorithm is just going to create less and less reach for that page. That’s not true!
We bring these rules, strategies, tips and tricks into this all-or-nothing thinking which winds up with you having half done a Facebook page and seeing very few results because you haven’t nailed it, and deciding that all the fear-based junk that has been shared on the internet must be true… so you stop trying.
BUT when you take the time, energy and effort to find a core strategy that works for you, and nail it consistently, you reach more people and you make more sales.
And you get to do that for free!
There are very few opportunities in the world for you to build an audience and promote to them for free.
Social media is one of those opportunities.
The problem is not social media, it’s the way you use social media.
It’s your experience with social media. It’s the results you’re getting from social media. It is the fear-based rhetoric that you’ve taken as gospel about social media.
Instead of buying into the fear, rules and tactics, and tying yourself in knots, why not craft a simple effective Facebook/Instagram strategy that you know, with consistency and time, will expand your reach and your audience, and increase the number of sales that you’re making online for free?
It IS that simple. It IS that powerful.
The problem is that we do it for three or four weeks, don’t get instant results, get frustrated, decide there must be some other magic solution out there, and we never actually see it through with consistency.
We never actually ask the question, how can I make this work? Instead we constantly ask the question, does this work?
It’s the wrong question.
The question should be: How do I make this work effectively for me?
If you consistently ask that question and consistently look for a strategy that will actually help answer that question, you will find that you can make social media work for you really beautifully, and it remains a joy.
It remains fun, social and boundaried. THAT’S how you overcome social media overwhelm.
4. Have a strategy
If you were making $5,000 every time you showed up on social media, you wouldn’t find it overwhelming.
If you were getting three or four people sending you a private message every time you posted an offer telling you how much they needed what you’re offering, you wouldn’t say it’s a waste of time.
And if you were able to see that month on month, your social media time stayed the same every day but your results got bigger and bigger, you wouldn’t say it’s all too hard.
The problem is not social media, it’s that you haven’t found or implemented consistently a strategy that, with boundaried time, gets greater and greater results for you.
That is possible!
There are so many people that believe that it’s not possible for them. In my world, not only is it possible, I also have hundreds and hundreds of people who are proving how easy it can be.
I want you to remind yourself that social media only feels overwhelming when it’s not getting the results for you.
If it was getting results, you wouldn’t be angry at it. If it was getting results, you wouldn’t be so quick to dismiss it.
The difference between social media that gets results and social media that doesn’t get results is having a strategy that works. It’s having a plan that you follow consistently.
If you would like to refine your strategy to actually give social media a chance, if you would like to overcome your social media overwhelm and focus down on the social media strategy that attracts and converts people into paying clients, then I would love for you to come and check out my free training.
It’s called the $0 Facebook Marketing Plan.
That is the very simple, very effective Facebook marketing strategy that grows your audience, connects with them and create sales.
You DON’T have to be:
- Following a list of 35 rules about links in comments and data
- Sliding into strangers’ DMs and pretending that you’re interested in connecting with them as a human (when really all you want to do is connect with them as a customer)
- Posting perfectly manicured photos
- Writing 500-word captions and using the perfect set of 15 hashtags
It is a very simple, very effective Facebook strategy that will continue to grow your results from social media.
You can get that free training at tashcorbin.com/zero
Even if you’ve watched this one before, I would highly recommend that you go and check it out because it gets updated very regularly, AND sometimes we need to remind ourselves of the basics.
Don’t forget to come over to the Heart-Centred Soul-Driven Entrepreneurs Facebook group and share any rules that you’ve heard, as well as what makes your social media strategy feel hard
Until next time, I cannot WAIT to see you SHINE.
