Why doing less is great social media strategy for freelancers and micro-business owners, and how to figure out where to focus your time and energy.
Get your Action It April workbook: https://socialmediaforhumans.club/product/action-it-workbook/
Free Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/BCSacorn
Alexis' links.
I hang out on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/alexisbushnell/
Find me on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SocialMediaForHumans
Join the club to learn more about ethical and effective social media marketing: https://socialmediaforhumans.club/
Voice over by Hawke Wood: https://www.spotlight.com/3490-9081-8844
Alexis' links.
I hang out on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/alexisbushnell/
Find me on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SocialMediaForHumans
Join the club to learn more about ethical and effective social media marketing: https://socialmediaforhumans.club/
Voice over by Hawke Wood: https://www.spotlight.com/3490-9081-8844
Why doing less is great social media strategy for freelancers and micro-business owners, and how to figure out where to focus your time and energy.
Get your Action It April workbook: https://socialmediaforhumans.club/product/action-it-workbook/
Free Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/BCSacorn
Alexis' links.
I hang out on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/alexisbushnell/
Find me on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SocialMediaForHumans
Join the club to learn more about ethical and effective social media marketing: https://socialmediaforhumans.club/
Voice over by Hawke Wood: https://www.spotlight.com/3490-9081-8844
Alexis' links.
I hang out on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/alexisbushnell/
Find me on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SocialMediaForHumans
Join the club to learn more about ethical and effective social media marketing: https://socialmediaforhumans.club/
Voice over by Hawke Wood: https://www.spotlight.com/3490-9081-8844
Hello and welcome to Social Media for Humans, the podcast that empowers you to do social differently. Your host, Alexis Bushnell, and her guests discuss their experience of social media as business owners, users and ultimately, humans. With insights and advice to help you find an effective and ethical strategy that works for you. Grab yourself a drink and join the
conversation. Alexis:Hi hello hi! Welcome to another little quick tip episode of the Social Media for Humans podcast. Today I want to chat a little bit about why doing less on social media is actually a really good plan. I realise that I am potentially a sole voice against the many, many people who are telling you that you need more content and to use more different functions and more platforms and just generally do more, so hear me out. The reason that I suggest that doing less is a good strategy is because most of the people, all of the people, who I work with are very small business owners, micro business owners, mostly solopreneurs, individual people freelancing, running their own business, they don't have a team. If you have a team, amazing, you can do more, go for it! Outsource it, live your best life. But if you are just you and you are trying to do whatever your actual job is, do your accounts, do all the behind the scenes stuff, do all your marketing, keep on top of everything that goes into running a business that isn't even related to what you are actually doing in your business, doing more is probably not feasible, so doing less is great. The other thing is, if you have a lot of other stuff going on and you are solely responsible for this, you can't do lots of things well so it is much, much better for you to concentrate your energy and the time that you do have on doing stuff that works and doing it well. So this can mean only using one social media platform, it can mean massively reducing, or even just a little bit reducing, the amount of content you're trying to put out, it can mean allowing yourself to not do reels or not do stories or not create videos, it can be setting time limits on how much engagement you do instead of putting the pressure on yourself to reply immediately or to spend an hour or more engaging every single day. The point is to think about what is actually feasible for you based on everything else you have going on, not just in your business but in your life, you know. Are you doing the school run? Do you need to sleep? Yes, spoilers, yes you do! How long is it taking you to cook dinner and eat lunch and breakfast, and generally you know, get outside and exercise or whatever it is that you are doing? Like how long do you want to spend having a social life? How much time do you want to spend chilling on the sofa? All those things need to come into be taken into consideration when you are figuring out what your social media strategy looks like, because if you cannot outsource stuff, if you don't have a team and you say like "right, I need to engage for an hour a day, I need to get out at least one post every single day, I need to do at least one reel a week, I need to be on stories every day, I need to be in Facebook groups, I need to take part in these three Twitter chats. Like, I am overwhelmed just thinking about that, so who knows how you feel! And you are not going to do any of those things well because you are going to be just spread so thin and feeling so overwhelmed and so stressed out you can't focus the same. The content won't be as good, the engagement will just be like a random heart here and a quick "great post" there, and that's okay occasionally but to really get the most from any of these individual things you've got to go not all in, but you've got to put in a reasonable amount of effort and focus to actually get results from it. So if you are on every platform, or just multiple platforms, think about what it would mean to just focus on one and which one would you focus on. Where are you already getting results? You know, if you are trying to reply to messages, DMs, comments immediately, what would it look like for you to hop on for half an hour once a day and catch up on replying to people and do some outreach engagement if you have some time in that in that time? Have a think about what is really feasible for you and then, this is this is your permission slip. I am allegedly, according to other people, a social media expert. I do work in social media, this is my job, so I can confirm it is okay to do these things. So if you would like permission from somebody whose job this is, who knows this stuff, this is your permission slip. You don't have to do those things. You can stop posting on those platforms. You can post much less. You can totally give up on that specific format of post that you hate creating, it's okay. On this same theme, I'm actually running Action It April which is about doing less and achieving more, so we are looking at cutting down on what you're doing and seeing how much better your stats are, and you feel, and your business runs, because you're doing less, because we are here for that! It is running across all my social media, public social media, my free Facebook group "Acorn a nourishing ecosystem for small biz," the link will be in the show notes obviously. There is also a workbook that goes alongside it. The workbook takes you through how to figure out what to cut out of your social media strategy and also kind of cheers you on as you go, so it's a four week plan, you can do it any four weeks doesn't have to be in April, you are not too late if you want to start now, it's fine! The workbook also comes with a video which sort of explains each step, takes you through how to fill it in and all that kind of thing. The workbook is £10, again there will be a link to that if you are interested in the show notes. And exciting podcast news! Next week for Earth Day, that is the 22nd of April, we are going to be having a live episode of the podcast. It's going to be a roundtable episode with a variety of different ethical business owners and we're going to chat about the happy, great things about being an ethical business owner, the really hard stuff about being an ethical business owner, and also a little bit about how as a consumer you can support the kinds of businesses that you actually want to see. It's gonna be really really great chat, I'm really looking forward to it. It is going to be going out live to YouTube, Facebook and LinkedIn so if you want to see the live, leave some questions, comments, get involved, we would love to see you there. I will be releasing on my social media a list of who else is going to be involved. If you are an audio listener I will be doing my very, very best to get the audio version out the same day, it will probably be very late afternoon if not evening because I am just me, this is this is 100% of my business, just me! So I'm gonna do the live in the morning and then work very hard to do captions, convert it to the audio file, get it uploaded, get the transcript up, get it out there. So yes, the audio only version will be late on Friday the 22nd of April but it will be worth it! So there's that. Okay, that's it, that's me. Do follow me on social media for more updates about who is going to be joining me for that roundtable, I am super excited. Yes, take care of yourselves.
Hawke:If you want more regular reminders to find your own way to use social media, follow Alexis on your social platform of choice, all the links will be in the show notes. Until next time, be a human.