Breaking Free From Social Media Fatigue

Andréa Jones (00:00):
There's a lot of shame and stigma about taking breaks on social media. And so today I want to dive into that topic and why I firmly believe that we must rest when it comes to social media, especially for those of us who run businesses based on our image and personality. Let's get into it.

Intro (00:33):
Welcome to The Savvy Social Podcast, the show that blends stories and strategies to help businesses create engaged and profitable online communities using the unique power of social media. And now, your host, Andréa Jones.

Andréa Jones (00:50):
Listeners, you're in for a treat. Before I dive in today's episode, I got to remind you to grab your 15% off over at Riverside. Riverside is the podcast recording studio that we now use for our show, and y'all, they feel super luxurious. So head over to Riverside. You get 15, that's one 5% off all of their plans by using the code Drea, that's DREA at checkout. Click the link in the show notes to get started today for free.

(01:22):
Now, this is the time of year where things feel compressed, time feels compressed. It's like everything's going very quickly. There's lots to do. We've got all these holiday parties, we've got the end of year planning, we're trying to juggle. If you have kids, you're juggling the daycare school schedules time off on top of running our business. And especially those of you listening who you're the face of your business, your customers and clients work with you directly, or it's your image that's oftentimes used on social media.

(02:00):
It can be very hard to show up for yourself and your business in times like these. So I want to dive into this day because we often equate followers and engagement to success. And sometimes we think followers and engagement means we're doing the right thing. We think, well, I post it every day, so I check that box. So therefore, X, y, Z should happen in our business, and that equation isn't always accurate. So I'm in Myleik’s group, Myleik & Mommas. She has Myleik Teele, she's the founder of CURLBOX and is just a fabulous business owner. I've been following her for years. She built this amazing community of moms and parents and people who support kids and even people who are re-parenting themselves to talk all about that entire process. And so we had a live call recently, and Myleik was sharing to one of the questions on the call that we have these people in our social media communities who are a different group of people than the people who are paying us.

(03:17):
So the people on social media, the people in the comment sections, the people sharing the feedback, the loudest don't tend to be the people who pay us. And I find this to be true for a lot of my clients. So for example, I have a client who is a divorce coach. So she works with people going through divorce. And typically these people are not leaving comments like I'm thinking about divorcing my husband. The clients who pay her are silent on social media. So we're looking at other metrics. We're like, did they watch this video? Did they save it? Did they share it out?

(03:55):
Those metrics are more important to us than followers and engagement. So because of that pressure we put on ourselves, we tend to overcompensate in the wrong areas because we're equating followers engagement to success. So I want to talk today a little bit about what happens to us as business owners, as founders, as creators when we do this, and what happens to us when we do not take breaks from social media when we do not rest when it comes to social media?

(04:22):
Because hearing a lot of people talk about social media fatigue. And so in researching for this episode, I came across an article from the National Library of Medicine, which is part of the US government, and they have a definition for social media fatigue that I want to share with you. It says, this social media fatigue has seen a significant increase through the Covid-19 pandemic. And it refers to high levels of information overload experience due to extensive usage of social media. So collectively, as a society, we are going through social media fatigue because we are actually consuming social media at our faster rate, at a faster pace than we ever have in history, because honestly, it was something that we needed during the times that we needed it. So rewind, March, 2020, everything shuts down two weeks, crest a curb, and we're locked away and we're not meeting in our physical communities in our physical spaces.

(05:27):
So we meet in digital spaces, which for a lot of us is online and on social media and through Zoom and things like that. So what's happening now is we created some bad habits. I know for me, that's when I really dug into TikTok and found my love for TikTok. And sometimes that means I see bad habits from that time period still popping up again. I find myself scrolling through TikTok searching for something and feeling very tired at the same time while I'm doing it and feeling fatigued after I'm doing it. And so this information overload is part of the challenge that we're dealing with. Now as consumers combine that with, as business owners, we feel like we should be posting more than we are. So talk about this a lot on the podcast. There are a lot of people out there who say things like Post a TikTok three to five times a day.

(06:32):
I'm not saying that doesn't work because a lot of use cases show that it does work. If you post a TikTok three, five times a day, you will probably see some level of success more than the person who posts once a day. Or like me, I post maybe twice or three times a week. But what I'm coming across is this immense amount of pressure for business owners to post three to five times a day that's coming from a place of should so I should be doing this. And it's cannibalizing the time that they want to spend doing the things in their business that actually enrich them and enlighten them. So an example is one of my clients really loves recording her podcast. It's her thing. She puts all of her research, her time, her energy into recording her podcast. She loves it. If I ask her to record a video, it's like pulling teeth.

(07:25):
It takes her three times as long as it does to put together a podcast episode. And she visibly looks uncomfortable in the video. So it doesn't come across on social media. I say all that to say, not only do we have the studies showing that we are experiencing this collective social media fatigue, but then we also have external internal pressures as business owners to produce absolutely insane amounts of content and content for the sake of checking off a content box. So if you're like, Andrea, I don't know if I'm going through this, but I think I am. Here are some of the signs that you may be experiencing this level of fatigue or overwhelm if you post content and before you post it, you feel like you're not good enough, you may be in this place. And I've been talking to a lot of business owners about this where they spend a lot of time and energy creating content, and then they feel like before they even post, it's not good enough.

(08:25):
And then the engagement on that post confirms what they already thought, I'm not good enough. And the people who are posting three to five times a day think differently about this. They're excited to post. They look forward to posting this much. They are proud of the work no matter if it got picked up by the algorithm or not. So there's a little bit of a difference there. So if you're feeling that I'm not good enough feeling, you may be experiencing this social media fatigue, social overwhelm. If you also feel like you spend way too much time consuming content, and after you consume content, you feel uninspired, you may be overwhelmed with the amount of content you're consuming. This also can look like comparisonitis. So you're scrolling through Instagram, you're scrolling through LinkedIn, and then you go to create your content and you feel like, man, it's already been said.

(09:19):
It's already out there. It's already been done. And so you feel that guilt, that blockage. This also may show up as irritability or anger. So this happens when you start switching into jealousy. You get enraged about conversations that are happening online. You feel irrationally irritated by other people in your space or people not in your space because of their success. I see this happen a lot when a business owner looks at an influencer. So I put business owner in a different category than influencer. Influencers, their whole goal is to get as many views as possible like a Mr. Beast. His whole goal is to get as many people to watch and consume his content as possible. Our goals as business owners are different. We want the right people to consume our content so they can move through our social media sales funnel. But what happens is we discredit those people who are consuming our content.

(10:24):
We're looking at and examining someone else and going, man, they have more the appearance, the false appearance of success. We can see their followers, we can see their engagement, and we feel angry about that. We feel irritated by that. That is a sign that you may be on social media too much. Okay.

(10:45):
Alright. One last sign that I want to share with you. And this list is not comprehensive. Just some ideas for you is that you're feeling completely disengaged from the social media process. You could care less. In fact, it may not even be for you. So you feel this mild sense of obligation, but for the most part you're like, I don't care about any of this. I want to delete Instagram from my phone and never look at it again. That is a sign that you may be overwhelmed with the process. So I want to talk a little bit about how rest on social media is a strategy and not a last resort.

(11:25):
Because oftentimes we look at resting in our marketing as a last resort. I feel burnt out, therefore right? I feel burnt out, therefore, I'm going to take a social media break or I feel overwhelmed, therefore I'm going to reduce my posting down. There is a difference between preventative rest and reactive rest. So reactive rest is that I feel burnt out. Therefore feeling right, you're like, oh, I am feeling all of these feelings in my body. What Andrea's describing is how I'm feeling right now. So I need to rest as a reaction to that, right? And there's nothing wrong with that. That is a good place to be. And also this podcast episode is about preventative rest. How do we build rest into our social media habits so that we can continue on more of a long form, long-term strategy with our marketing versus having bursts of energy and then feeling terrible about bursts of in times where we don't feel energetically aligned.

(12:37):
When you rest regularly, you don't feel the need for extreme moments of detox. Like social media detoxing is a very popular Google search term because a lot of people get to the extreme where they're like, I need to figure out something because this current thing isn't working, instead of being preventative and planning ahead on this. And I think about this a lot in relation to how we rest in our natural work cycles. So most of us work traditionally five days a week, Monday to Friday, maybe we're taking Saturday, Sunday off, maybe we even have holidays off. Maybe we take a couple weeks off for vacation and it's a cycle and it's how our society's kind of set up. And some people take even more than that. My husband and I were talking about how teachers have rest built in during things like the summer holidays, and especially here in Ontario where we live in Ontario, Canada, it's a lot different.

(13:39):
Like the structure that of how teachers are paid and the rest that they get is different than where I grew up in Atlanta, Georgia, right? Where teachers I knew and went to school or teachers who were in my school, it was very common to see them not only work in the school day, have a part-time job in the evenings and weekends and then take another gig over the summer. There's no time for rest in there.

(14:04):
So Harvard Business Review actually released an article a few months ago about how taking a vacation improves your mental health and your wellbeing. And they say things like, there is a cognitive impact when you don't take time off, you mentally cannot function at a hundred percent. When you don't take time off, your mind is too cluttered, your body feels tense. So you're not allowing yourself to relax. Your soul feels like it doesn't have room to breathe because you filled it with work and with the things that you must do.

(14:46):
And they say things like Uncluttering your mind will allow you to think more clearly and boost creativity. And they have a bunch of research that it links to. So I'll link to that article in the show notes. But the one I found interesting was this one. In a study of 749 women researchers found that those who took vacation less than once every six years were eight times more likely to develop heart problems compared to those who went on vacation twice a year. So essentially, those women who went on vacation more were eight times less likely to develop heart problems, eight times less likely. So I'm saying all that to say if we apply what the research says about work to how we approach marketing, it is good for our wellbeing to incorporate rest into our marketing strategies. And I'm specifically talking about social media here because social media is one of those 24 hours a day, seven days a week, marketing channels where we feel on all the time, where we feel guilty when we're not available.

(16:02):
And this is kind of that entrepreneurial mindset that we get into of feeling on all the time, feeling available all the time. We always check our email, we always respond. Some industries feel it more than others. Social media is one of those things where there's the appearance that we're always on, we're always available. And as this article points out, we don't give ourselves space to consider what we really want or what's important to us. We're just dragged by those notifications back into an app that we feel apprehensive about at most. So we're going to take a break, and then I want to talk a little bit about how you can approach this conversation and how you can start shifting your mindset to think differently about rest and social media when we get back.

(16:50):
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(17:35):
All right, and we're back. Let's talk about some questions and steps to consider as you think about incorporating rest into your everyday social media strategy because kind of different tiers here, we want to build rest into our social media habits on a regular basis. So an example for me is I'm not on social on the weekends, almost 50 weeks out of the 52 weeks of the year. I am not on social on the weekends. Sometimes when we do larger campaigns, or recently we had our in-person event. I was on social media on the weekend for that. But for the most part, that's one of the ways that I build my habits to have boundaries so that I'm not pulled back in to social media when I don't need to be there. And I'll talk more about setting boundaries in a second, but this idea of having a boundary didn't just come to me.

(18:34):
It's intentional. So no social media on the weekends, and honestly, all this is super important for me right now because my daughter, Ellie, my one and a half year old just started daycare and I have been having afternoons with her for her entire life. And so it feels really hard for me to not have that time anymore, even though I know it's better for everybody at this moment. She fricking loves daycare. She runs the place that is her home and everyone follows her rules. So it's great. It's a good thing. And I deeply miss our times together every day. So for me, weekends are even more important because it's like my Ellie time and we can just spend time together as a whole family. And if I'm pulled away by some Instagram notification that detracts from my time with my family, and I found personally if I don't have those breaks, my anxiety level increases.

(19:32):
I'm not able to actually pull myself back to stasis. I'm not actually able to ground myself. And so my anxiety increases, never gets a break. So then every single week, it increases a little bit, a little bit, a little bit until I have a breakdown that's just me and my habits and my patterns. And it took almost 10 years of working in the online space to fully understand that. Now again, I'm not perfect. There are some weekends where I still am on social, but another way that I keep this boundary is I turn off all of my notifications. So if I'm on social, I had to click the app and go look at it to see what's happening. I'm not getting pulled back in. And like I said, there are some moments where I turned on notifications, like when I was hosting our savvy social retreat a couple weeks ago, but for the most part, no social on the weekends, and that's by design.

(20:28):
I replaced it with other things. And even after Ellie goes to sleep, this year was the best year that I've really leaned into this habit, this boundary. And y'all, I have read over 120 books this year and I consider myself a reader, but most years I get 20, 30 books on a good year. This year to have 120 feels wild to me, but I simply replaced scrolling on social media at the end of the night with reading. Now, I will also say my caveat to this is I was experiencing some pregnancy insomnia, and then at the beginning of this year, Ellie was not sleeping through the night. We couldn't figure out why. And so I would wake up with her to get her back to sleep, but then by the time I'd go to lay down, I was fully awake, so I would read. So I replace scrolling time on social media with reading and what a difference it makes in my anxiety levels to not be inundated by the digital clutter that is content online.

(21:31):
So I build in boundaries that are daily, weekly habits for me. Then I look at seasonal boundaries and seasonal habits, and I encourage you to think the same about the way you approach social media. So some of my clients, for instance, take time off during the summer here in Canada where we live, July and August, very popular time to slow things down in your business, in your life, in your work. Kids are out of school, going on vacations, going camping, traveling around, just even just existing outside because summer is so short here, literally we pack up everything and just live outside for months. That's a season where I may approach social media differently, then I would the rest of the year, but also seasons of life. I am pregnant right now with baby number two, and I'm headed into a season of my life that's going to look a little bit differently.

(22:31):
And so I'm approaching my habits and my boundaries differently. I'm just simply looking at things differently than I would if I weren't pregnant, and I'm actually going to be recording an episode and releasing it for you next week about how I'm doing that, but also building it into your business. So building habits and boundaries into how you run your business as well. I sat down on our vintage trolley next to someone at the retreat, and they were talking about how they wanted to start integrating social media into their strategy, into their marketing, but they weren't sure how to. And the first question I asked them was how they serve their clients? What is their business model? Where did their clients come from? And most of their clients came in through referrals, and they preferred it that way because they're the higher quality clients. They do get some from SEO.

(23:29):
So someone search for what they do, stumbles across the website, they become a client, but those clients aren't always the best fit. The best fit for them is if someone says, oh, you should hire this person. And so I said, when we think about that, your social media strategy is going to look completely different from someone whose business model it is to sell printables, digital printables, and maybe they market them to teachers and it's very low cost. So they just need a really large audience. Your strategy is going to look so different from the high level of service she provides and the approach to the marketing and who they're even targeting as she was describing her ideal client, realizing that this person just doesn't spend a lot of time on social media anyways. They're reading books, they're listening to podcasts, so her social strategy is going to look different.

(24:27):
And that boundary, that habit for her is going to look different. And I always believe social media should reflect what your business is like, but for her strategy is more of a proof that she is an expert and she knows what she's doing. She doesn't need to have posts every day or every week even. She just needs to have stuff there. So when this person finds her and they look her up on LinkedIn, they can see that she has something going on. This person expects that they have a level of expectation for what her website will look like, what her branding should look like, what her marketing should look like, but they just want to see that it's there. They don't necessarily need to see three to five posts a day, nor do they want to because now they're thinking, how are you posting five times a day and serving your clients at this high level?

(25:14):
So building your habits and boundaries around your business model makes sense as well. And when we think about all of these things, habits on a daily, weekly level, habits on a seasonal level, habits and boundaries on a business model level, it's important to also make sure that we have regular check-ins to reassess if these habits are working for us. I like to do this yearly. I tend to do it around the new year, but we also in the Savvy Social School do a challenge every year in late December for this reason, we want to rest, take a step back, look at our habits, look at our boundaries, and go, is this working for me? That's the only question you have to ask yourself, is this working for me? If it is, great, continue doing it. If it's not, then dig deeper and peel back the layers for why it isn't working for you.

(26:07):
Technology can help with this. You can do things like scheduling posts, you can batch content or work ahead. There's so many ways to implement this. The first step is to recognize it. Now, listen, at this point in the episode, if you're like, Andrea, I'm too far gone. I need something now, you may need a hard reset. And I kind of teased people who do this sometimes, and I really shouldn't because sometimes it's just what we need, but sometimes we need to pull the emergency break, delete the app off our phone and give ourself a break. Okay? Pull that emergency break. Put your mask on first as they say in the airplane, and take care of yourself and your needs because it's very easy for this to spiral out of control. And you get to the point where you're not able to show up. And I see people do this all the time with, they spend so much time on social media that it's actually not working for them.

(27:08):
They didn't take time to analyze why, and then they have to shut down their business because it's just not working. So pull that emergency break, take your time. And the question I get when I tell people this is they're like, well, how much time should I take? As much as you need? Literally take as much time as you need. And sometimes that's just checking in with yourself, regularly going with your gut. That may be weeks, it could be months, it could be years, but you got to put yourself first. Especially again, those of you, those of us who are the face, the personality, the entity that is present on social media behind our business, behind our brand. Now, if you're at this point in the episode and you're like, I don't really need a hard reset, but I definitely need a reset, and I'm just thinking about when to do that, you can plan your detox.

(27:56):
This is my favorite way to go about it. I've done this twice now, and I will probably do it again in the history of my business multiple times because these detoxing breaks are so clarifying. It can be very helpful for you to plan them. Now, planning them around a vacation sometimes makes the most sense, but I don't know. Sometimes when we're the face or the personality behind the brand, we still end up working on vacation and we still end up posting just stories and things on social media while we're off in quotes. Those are air quotes off. So that's not it. That's not the digital detox. You're just doing the work in a new location if I'm being real. So I want you to plan an actual detox. This means you're not in marketing, you're not on social media, you're not consuming, you're not producing, okay, you're giving yourself a clean slate and a break.

(28:54):
Some people like to do a completely technological detox. I can't do that personally because I read books on Kindle on my phone, but when I'm detoxing, I delete the apps off my phone. Okay? So plan out, map out when you're detox will be, you want to give yourself a start date and an end date. It could be a few hours, it could be a day, it could be a week, it could be months. Okay? The first time I did this, I did two weeks and I did completely digital detox. I actually went to library and got books for that. Those two weeks though, I did end up using my phone. There was a meditation I was doing on my phone, and then I like to do Yoga with Adriene, and she's on YouTube, which is on the tv. So it wasn't completely digital free. I think that's hard to do in today's age, but give yourself a start date.

(29:43):
Give yourself an end date. The end date is key too because you can always evaluate at the end date how you want to continue as part of your detox, and then figure out what you want to detox from. Okay, so what do you want to detox from? So for example, if I were to do a detox right now, that would definitely include Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn threads, yeah, Facebook, but it would not include Reddit. So for me, Reddit I use personally, and I'm not on there for work, and I only am in Reddit communities that are work related or business related at all. So I wouldn't put that in my detox line. So figure out what you want to detox from. Is it email? Is it social? Is it all of it? Is it just one platform? And then figure out how you want to communicate your detox.

(30:38):
So as mentioned, if you're going on vacation, you could just simply communicate, I'm on vacation. I'll respond to emails and messages when I get back. You could have your team come in and be there for you while you're on vacation if you have a team. One person that, oh, I talked to her on the podcast, all right, I just went back and looked. But in episode 24 of the podcast, I sat down with Brit Kolo and she talked about how she took a break from social media and in every post, she pre-planned it, pre-schedule it. Put a little note like, I'm on a social media break. If you leave a comment, I'll respond when I return. So there are so many different ways you can communicate this break to people, and I feel like sometimes we shy away from it and we assume people will think about us a certain way or not.

(31:34):
But honestly, most people, most reasonable people aren't bothered by it. In fact, they celebrate it. And even if you take a break unannounced, this happens a lot with celebrity entrepreneurs and people who have larger audiences. If you are pulling that emergency break, this is unannounced. You're just taking a few weeks off your audience, your followers, your community members, they may not know that you're taking time off when you come back. Sometimes people feel like they need to announce it and make a big deal out of it, totally up to you. You could come back and just start posting again, or you can tell them why you took your break. It depends on your own boundaries there and your own transparency. Whatever you decide. At the end of the day, I do recommend that you do a post detox reflection time. So this is your moment to decide what you're doing next and how you are setting up your social media habits and boundaries.

(32:29):
Because if you detox and then you get back into the habits that you were doing before the detox, you're going to have to pull that emergency break again sooner than you think. Okay? And detoxes are important too. So you may even go through the detox and go, oh, I'm doing this again in three months, or I'm doing this again next year. So it's important for you to reflect on how to do that. So let's talk about how to set these boundaries. How do we navigate through social media and protect ourselves and have habits that have rest built into them? And I have a free meditation that goes through this. It's at socialmediaunwind.com. During the pandemic, I released a small run meditation series. There's 10 free meditations, and if you ever brought a product for me, you actually have two bonus meditations inside of our community space.

(33:21):
These meditations are about five minutes, five to 10 minutes. So super short. The very first one is all about understanding your relationship with social media. And so I walk you through how you feel when you're scrolling through your feed. So you can listen to that meditation, or you can just do it as an activity right now. Open up your app, scroll through the feed and notice how you feel when you look at the post. You see a post and you go, oh, this is cute. I like this. You see a post and you're like, I feel irritated and angry. You see a post and you're like, why am I reading this? This doesn't mean anything for me. Start noticing how you feel when you scroll through social media, because this will help you set up your guardrails and your boundaries. There are some people where I follow them, but their posts are muted.

(34:09):
I don't need to see them. That's part of my own thing. Some people, I just completely unfollow them like, I grew past needing this information. I don't need anymore. Maybe you changed your style of how you're delivering things and it doesn't resonate with me, or I just don't care anymore. Unfollow some people. I feel really good about their content. And then others, I start feeling those comparison gremlins coming up saying, look how good they are. You should be better. And I'm like, oh, unfollowed. Okay. Now, I do have a list of competitors that I make sure to check in because I do, especially in my industry, want to make sure that I'm not too close in the way that I'm creating content. It's not too similar to them, but it's also not so different that I'm out of touch with the conversations that are happening at large in the industry.

(35:01):
So I have a little Google Keynote of people who I'm like, okay, I'll check in with them once a quarter, see what's up, and then I don't need to see them in my feed. So figure out what those emotions that come up for you as you scroll through social media. You may even notice, I don't need this app anymore. This happened with me recently with x slash Twitter on a call or recently, and someone said, Elon Musty instead of Elon Musk, which I thought was just hilarious. Anyways, I felt this with X, formerly known as Twitter. Scrolling through the feed, I was like, none of this relates to me. Me. There are a few people where I'm like, I like their posts, and I know they post this also on thread, so I'm just going to go over there. The thing about this exercise is that boundaries often have to be pushed in order for us to see the line.

(35:54):
I'll say that again. Boundaries often have to be pushed in order for us to see the line where the boundary is. So we creep closer and closer to the boundaries. We follow more and more people. We start interacting with more and more posts. And it's not until we take a step back and go, oh, there was the line that we can see it. Otherwise, we're just swimming along, swimming along, and then the line's way back there, and we're like, we crossed the line ages ago and we're way over here and this feels terrible. Emergency break. Pull it, right? So noticing how close you're getting to your boundaries when it crosses a line and when it doesn't is a really important exercise. And then enforcing those boundaries for yourself. So for example, no notifications for me. I test this out regularly because sometimes I join a new social app and especially new ones where they don't, I don't turn off the notifications like, yeah, I'm new here.

(36:52):
I did this with Threads, immediately turned off the notifications that lasted two days. That's still a very clear boundary for me. I don't need it. Same thing for documenting my life. For me, it's just not natural. When I'm in this office, I can produce all the content in the world. I love recording content. When I'm in my office, if I'm out and about and it's not a picture of my daughter, I'm almost never going to think, oh, this is going to be social media content later. It has to be a content shoot or a moment, or, I'm very intentional about recording it, otherwise it just does not happen for me. So my office for me is work time. And so that's a boundary for me that I do try to push or test or explore, I should say, and then I realize, Nope, I'm totally fine with producing content just in this office.

(37:51):
And that's it. And that's where I produce most of my content. As you go through this and as you decide on your next steps, I do want to encourage you to think about two things. One is consider who you're taking advice from. There are a lot of educators, business strategists, marketing strategists, marketers out there who recommend things that disagree with what I just said in this podcast episode, and that's usually because their life set up looks different. There are some people who don't mind recording content all day every day because it fulfills them, and that is rest for them. It's not for me, and it may not be for you. So be very mindful of whose advice you follow, because if you follow their advice, but you don't want a business that looks like theirs, then you may be leading yourself down the wrong path.

(38:48):
So not every person who has the shiny following, the shiny program, the polished, blah, blah, blah, you may not want to do that in your business. So really analyze who you're following and whose advice you're taking. Because if you don't want a business that looks like theirs, or if you don't want a life that looks like theirs, then you may be leading yourself down the wrong path. Or you may be leading yourself down something that is a hope and a dream, but not a reality. I see this a lot with celebrity entrepreneurs, flashing name brand thingies and vacations and cars and purses and all of this. And maybe that's something that's aspirational for you, but maybe it may not be practical, or, I'm going to be honest, I have worked with some of these people. They ain't got money either. Okay? They're lying to you.

(39:46):
Literally go check out Maggie Patterson's work if you want to learn more about this, because she talks a lot about this celebrity entrepreneur who's literally just posturing peacocking so that you want 'em to spend money with them, and they don't actually have that lifestyle. They don't have that money, or they have that lifestyle from something else, not their business. And so you're hoping to follow down that path, but that path wasn't even theirs. So yeah, be careful who you're learning from is the first thing. The second thing is, my entire goal with this episode is to help you decide on something that you can actually do, something that you can actually commit to in a sustainable way. And I do get pushback a lot from people on this because again, conventional wisdom on TikTok, you post three to five times a day and you'll see success.

(40:41):
Yes. Okay, let's say that's true. It's not sustainable. For most of the business owners that I work with, they have clients that they need to deliver services to. They have an inbox full of inquiries they need to respond to. They are not practiced at content production. So even the idea producing one video a day is a heavy lift for them because there's a technological skill that needs to be honed in on first. They're not even close to producing three to five content pieces a day, okay? So the goal here isn't just to say, take a break whenever. It's to say, take a break and let's build out social media habits, strategies, and systems that are actually sustainable that you can tap into. So if it's just you, let's figure out what that looks like. If you have a team, like my agency works with a lot of these personality brands, we're working with you, okay? So you can record the videos, but you have trouble thinking of the ideas. We got you, right? We'll send you the list of ideas. We'll say, sit here, say this for 60 seconds, and then you record a bunch of them, and then we'll write the captions and we'll post them, right? Maybe that's more sustainable for you. So the goal here is for you to actually consciously commit to social media habits that work for you and not get dragged by these apps.

(42:07):
Thank you so much for listening to another episode. Next week I am going to talk more about my maternity leave plan and how I'm approaching content production. So take a listen to that, and as always, leave a five star review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, helps keep us in the top 100 marketing podcast. That's all because of you. Thank you so much. I'll see you next week. Bye for now.