This is one that I have been talking about over on Social Media.
🤔 Have I become addicted to gambling? 🤔
Now, before I go on I want to caveat this with the fact that I don’t use this simile frivolously. For many people it is the difference between being able to paying their bills or not. It does feel like it’s, at times, a pot luck. It does feel like there’s an instability potentially around every corner. Perhaps it’s the risk that we take, perhaps it sucks us in – whichever way it can be difference between being ok and spiralling away.
I’m talking about using Social Media and in particular using social media from a marketing perspective.
You work hard on your craft, you bring all your expertise and experience to the platform. You share your awesome with the world. You’re asked many times, by many “experts” to bend yourself like a pretzel to create a bigger impact, to get visible, to be seen.
So think, years of graft, hours of honing your skills, thousands invested in your own development and you craft those posts, you truly want to help people BUT you also want to make a living out of your awesome, otherwise it’s not sustainable.
You put the post out there and you are at the mercy of the algorithm, this isn’t a bitch about the algorithm – it is what it is.
What you get back depends on many factors;
➡️ the aesthetics of that post
➡️ whether your audience is online at that time
➡️ whether someone reacts/interacts quickly with your post
➡️ the other posts that went out at the same time as your post
➡️ the size of your audience
➡️ how engaged your audience are
It’s a gamble. You’re gambling on it being seen. You can put exactly the same post out there at exactly the same time of day, on the same day of the week on consecutive weeks and it will have a different impact – so it’s not even all within your control.
So you do the work and who is it actually helping the most? You? Your audience? The social media platforms? It’s a very good question! Do you end up falling into the trap of purely producing content for the social media platforms, to assist them in keeping more people on their platform, to assist them in selling advertising on their platform because people are hanging around there?
Is it an addiction that business owners are falling into? Creating good quality work, for free and finding it harder and harder to convert that great quality work into an income?
I spent a lot of time working with people who are burned out from the constantness of Social Media, who have become apathetic to marketing their business because it requires more from them than it gives in return, who’ve lost their creativity, who have lost a sense of why they do what they do and who feel like they are constantly told to “make an offer” “make an offer” “make an offer” but equally to “provide value,” “be visible,” “be relevant,” “help people.”
❓ Do you feel that there’s become a level of negativity in your working relationship with Social Media?
❓ Do you feel like everyone is trying to teach you something, sell you something, make you feel you’re missing something?
❓ Do you feel like you gamble your earning potential on whether or not social media shows your message to your audience?
❓ Does it kinda feel like that scene in Love Actually where Hugh Grant talks about the relationship, I’ve amended it for context…
I fear that this has become a bad relationship; a relationship based on social media taking exactly what it wants and casually ignoring all those things that really matter to, erm… us. We may be a small businesses, but we’re a great ones, too.
Just some incoming thoughts today 🤔
Should I/we be creating hundreds of thousands of words, writing out little hearts out and feeling that they go unvalued?
Should I/we feel like it’s a gamble and we are at the mercy of the algorithm every time we seek to create an income within our business? Yes, I know we have other alternatives, I know we can pay to play and we can use our mailing list and YES I absolutely don’t believe Social Media owes us anything (although we are creating a shit load of content that keeps people on their platform).
I’d love to know your thoughts on this one….
You might want to dive into the comments on the original post, you’ll see that if this resonates with you then you’re absolutely NOT alone…
