Spiritual Biz Pep Talk: When Social Media Feels Hard
Social media – something we all love to hate.
How many conversations have you had in the last month – the last week even! – where someone has had a dig at social media?
As a business coach, I have these conversations daily with my clients and community.
And I get it – social media can be frustrating.
Especially when you pour your heart and soul into creating content and then it feels like it doesn’t go anywhere.
So in today’s episode of the Feminine Fire I want to share a little spiritual biz pep talk with you – for the times when social media feels hard.
You and I both know that you didn’t get into business to spend all your time trying to stay up to date with the changes and new features of a platform that you have no control over.
Yes – content creation and marketing is an integral part of business BUT you can be smart about it.
So in today’s episode of the Feminine Fire I want to share a little spiritual biz pep talk with you – for the times when social media feels hard.
This episode is for you if you’re:
Feeling frustrated and confused over the constant changing landscape of social media
Finding that you’re constantly comparing yourself to others in your industry
Feeling the pressure to “show up”
Finding it difficult to get the motivation to get back into posting consistently after a social media break
Overthinking every single post
In my experience, the relationship many business owners have with social media is…complicated to say the least.
So first – I want you to know that if you’re finding social media hard for any of these reasons – or perhaps other reasons – please know that you’re not alone.
But here’s the thing – and here’s where the pep talk begins…
You’ve gotta stop letting social media dictate how you feel about your business.
Unless you're a social media manager and it is literally your job, there is A LOT more to your business than what you share on socials.
This might be an unpopular or controversial opinion – but social media is literally not that big a deal.
Social media is a fabulous FREE marketing, connection and sales tool, but it's not the *only* one.
And any post that you do share, well, it just doesn’t have a very long lifespan AND *most* of your followers won’t see it – which yes, can be one of the frustrating things about social media BUT it can also be liberating…
Because it means that your business success is not tied to the performance of one single social media post. So you need to stop acting like it is!
That one social media post that you’re agonising over is literally not that big a deal.
One flopped social media post or a season of lower engagement on socials – does NOT mean anything about you or your business or even how good that piece of content actually is.
Yes, maybe there’s some messaging tweaks we can make? Or we can look at how you’re using social media as part of your overall marketing strategy to ensure you’re being strategic in the way that you use social media…
But… social media is fickle. The algorithm is fickle. You could literally post that same piece of content in a month and it’d perform differently.
So, your engagement isn’t great at the moment?
Okay, let’s monitor that BUT it’s probably not your biggest or most important business problem right now.
It might *feel* like it is, but it’s probably not.
And the more time you spend worrying and stressing about it, the less time you’re focusing on what you actually need to be focusing on.
So you need to stop letting social media dictate how you feel about your business.
Your business is bigger than that. Your mission and vision is bigger than that. You are bigger than that.
The amount of angst that social media causes is just not equivalent to how important it actually is.
Things that are more important than social media include:
Your sales and conversion rates
How shit hot your offers are
Your client experience and client retention rate
Your profit margins and monthly recurring revenue
These are all things that I’d encourage you to be looking at and focusing on OVER how many people are watching your Instagram stories right now.
Okay – so let me give you some practical tips to support you when social media feels hard.
Stop obsessing over your insights on individual posts
Firstly – if you’re finding yourself constantly checking your insights on individual posts, and obsessing over the numbers (or lack thereof)...
My advice is simple – stop looking at your insights. Like literally take a break from looking at your insights on individual posts.
It’s not helpful to be obsessing over the performance of individual posts. I recommend taking a macro approach to growth over obsessively tracking vanity metrics.
Yes, growing your community and audience is a legit goal that can support your business growth in a big way. But your overall growth is never going to rely on one single social media post.
Of course, you could have a reel go viral. Yay! But that doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll see significant growth in your following as a result. Social media growth will most likely happen as the result of a consistent and strategic content strategy.
If one post tanks, it literally doesn’t matter. So stop obsessing over these insights.
2. Implement better social media boundaries
If you find you’re constantly scrolling, spending more time consuming content rather than creating it, opening up the app to *do* something and then 20 minutes later trying to remember why you opened the app in the first place – you need some better social media boundaries.
This can look like:
Setting reminders and timers – Instagram now has this built in to remind you to take a break or pause notifications
Turning off notifications so your phone isn’t pinging all the time
Not responding to DMs at all hours of the day and night, weekends because you don’t need to
Deleting all social media apps off your phone on the weekend so you’re not unconsciously opening them up
Create your content outside the app using your Notes app, Google Docs or a scheduling tool
These are small simple things that can really help you stick to your boundaries and create more healthy habits around your social media use.
3. Create hero content and repurpose across platforms
If you want to get the most bang for your buck out of your content – it doesn’t start with social media.
The lifespan of social media content is quite frankly pretty shit. It changes depending on the platform and type of content but you’ve generally got only a few hours of people seeing your content and engaging with it.
It’s very short lived compared to longer form content like podcasts, blog posts, YouTube videos – which all have a much longer lifespan AND are goldmines for repurposing. This type of “hero” content is the content that keeps on giving.
Let’s take a podcast episode, for example – You can take a podcast episode and chop it up in many different ways.
I release a podcast episode every week. And every week I repurpose that episode into a blog post, I send an email to my list and I share a reel on Instagram that also gets shared to my stories.
But in addition to that, I then file my podcast notes away for future repurposing. My team and I have repurposed my podcast notes into launch emails, carousel posts, talking head reels, text only reels, the list goes on. As I said, this type of content is a goldmine.
So if you want to get smarter about your content creation process, start thinking of your content in this way.
Maximise the content you’re creating by making it easy to repurpose in a multitude of ways across your platforms, including socials. And if you’re strategic about it, one longer form hero piece of content can become many social media posts.
4. Focus on connecting and serving your community
If social media feels hard because you don’t know what to say or how much to share or how to frame it in the “best” way or whatever else – it’s highly likely that you’re overthinking it.
Yes, you want to be creating content strategically BUT you don’t want the idea of “being strategic” to stop you from creating content at all.
Stop overthinking it and come back to the basic principle of WHY you’re sharing content on social media – to connect and serve your community.
Yes, you’ll create and share sales content that’s designed to convert but for the most part, your social media content is about building trust and relationships with your people.
So quit overthinking and over-strategising when it comes to social media. It’s time to get back to basics:
What does your community need to hear right now?
What is something you can teach your community that they would find useful?
What conversations are you having with clients all the time that you could share?
What questions are you asked regularly?
Keep it simple and focus on connecting and serving your community first and foremost.
Remember, your content isn’t about YOU. Your content is about your audience and your community. So you always want to be coming back to that question of: what’s going to connect and serve your community best right now?
5. Use AI technology and ChatGPT if you’re feeling stuck
If social media feels hard because of the amount of time it takes to create content, then you want to be finding ways to cut down that time and make it easier for yourself.
One super simple and easy way to do that is to use AI technology and ChatGPT to help you with your content.
Now ChatGPT can help you actually write your social media captions and pretty much anything else you ask it to, and there are ways to help it learn your writing style so it sounds like you.
However, you don’t want to be creating boring, vanilla content that literally comes from a robot in its entirety. That’s not how you stand out and create meaningful content for your community.
However, staring at a blank page just hoping inspiration hits is also not going to get you any closer to meaningful content fast. And that’s where a tool like ChatGPT can really come in handy.
Generating content ideas.
Fleshing out your ideas.
And yes, maybe even writing some of your captions. Or writing a first draft that you can then edit to be more you.
If you’re feeling stuck on content ideas, ChatGPT is a gamechanger.
You can ask questions like, “can you suggest 10 different topic ideas related to XYZ area of expertise?”
For example, I could ask ChatGPT: “can you suggest 10 different topic ideas related to social media for spiritual entrepreneurs?”
Suddenly, your blank page is no longer a blank page. You’ve got 10 potential ideas you can work with. How’s that for saving time?
There’s obviously a lot more to AI and ChatGPT than generating content ideas and we could record probably more than a whole podcast episode on it but using it in this way is a damn good place to start – especially if your biggest frustration with social media right now is how long it takes to create content.
So – the big takeaway from this spiritual biz pep talk?
Stop allowing how you feel about social media to dictate how you feel about your business. Your business is so much more than that. Social media is ONE part of your overall marketing strategy.
Stop obsessing over it. Stop overthinking it. Stop focusing on how hard it feels.
Instead, focus on implementing practical strategies that make social media and your content creation process feel easier. I’ve shared a bunch of tips with you today to get you started.
So the next step here is to implement these tips! This information is literally useless unless you use it – so please use it, apply it, and take the actions.
And then report back! I’d love to hear from you.
