When it feels like your socials are going nowhere

Photo by Priscilla Du Preez 🇨🇦 on Unsplash

Back before my business was a business it was an inkling of an idea.💡

I had an energetic toddler and a baby who loved to be as close as possible as much of the time as possible. I was on maternity leave. My husband was adjusting to working from home. It was lockdown.

Life felt slow yet manic at the same time. 🙃

There was lots of opportunity to sit and think about my inkling of an idea, but a distinct lack of time to take any action on it.

I got focussed on what I could actually do on a consistent basis in the time that I did have. 🤷🏼‍♀️

Something that would help the idea slowly come to life, but in a way that fitted into this little pocket of life.

Social media was the obvious choice to me. 

Every Sunday afternoon I’d sit down at the computer for an hour to create and schedule a batch of posts for the week in one sitting. 👩‍💻

I really enjoyed it and felt a swell of satisfaction for keeping up the habit with everything else that was going on.

I wasn’t a natural social media person, I didn’t use it much at all in my personal life.

I knew it would take time to build an audience but I set myself what felt like generous goals to allow for that. 🏆

And then…..

Nothing happened. 

My following remained teeny tiny and the likes on my posts mostly stayed at a perfectly round zero.

Growing a big audience and being favoured by the algorithm wasn’t why I’d started out, but subconsciously it became the validation I was looking for.

To show me that this little inkling of an idea had a place in the outside world.

I started googling ‘social media strategies’ and the take away message was always the same - stay consistent.

And so I did, for months.

Still nothing changed, or at least not at any meaningful rate.

And so I stepped it up a notch. I added in more processes and tools, downloaded templates and tracked my stats.

But none of it worked.

Now that I’m sitting writing about it, it seems obvious what went wrong.

I might liken it to the difference between having a shop and putting all the effort into a gorgeous window display, only to walk in and be completely ignored. Instead of having no window display and a friendly shop keeper who greets you by name.

Does that analogy work?!

In a nutshell, I was putting a lot of time, effort and energy into creating batches of well curated social media posts, without putting any effort into the connection that they were meant to instil.

Now, my relationship with social media is totally different. Instagram has become a vehicle for lovely conversations and meeting new people doing super interesting things in the world.

I still spend time creating posts and writing content, but it doesn’t feel forced and there’s no template involved.

All of this to say, that if it feels like your social media is going into the void, then there is light at the end of the tunnel.

I now see those early stages as a necessary part of the creative process that have given me the confidence to craft my own way of doing things, just the same way that you will craft yours.

Got a question about getting active on socials? Slide over to my Insta DMs and I’ll happily have a chat!