How I Navigated The Social Media Slump: Mindfulness Strategies for Business Owners

Andréa Jones (00:00):
We've all been there before. That moment in time where we have the social media slump, we feel like deleting Instagram off our phone. We feel like never logging in again. We feel completely overwhelmed and bombarded by everything we could, should would be doing, and we're just over it. So in this episode, I want to talk about why that happens and some cures to help you along the way. Here we go.

(00:31):
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(01:17):
If you're new here, my name's Andréa Jones. Hi. Hello. I'm a social media strategist host of this podcast and I'm all about helping business owners like you make connection, build community and make your difference in the world. Now this is episode 299 and it comes at a time where I have a very big announcement happening in the next episode. So I hate to be that girl, but I'm that girl y'all. This episode is here intentionally because the next episode is going to be huge. So you don't want to miss episode 300, can't believe we. We've done 300 episodes. You won't want to miss it, so stay tuned for that.

(01:58):
In the meantime, I got to talk about this slump. So a bit of context and history here. I started my business in 2014. It's 2024, so 10 years later, about two to three years in. This is 2017, I was feeling this slump. I like to call it disillusionment with social media here. I was a social media manager in 2017. I had 40 clients working all the time. I was working all the time. I did not have kids. I had a team helping me with services. I wasn't doing hardly anything for my own marketing, and I was completely overwhelmed by the notifications coming in an email here, a Facebook message there, Instagram messages, Twitter tweets coming in, and all of that was blowing up my phone. And I had this moment, and I wish I could just say it was just a, but it was like a series of moments where it felt like I was increasingly becoming anxious at even the thought of another notification coming in.

(03:10):
And I remember days where I procrastinated opening my phone, my inbox because it felt like I just constantly had to be responsive to everybody and I wasn't moving the needle in my business. I wasn't getting ahead and doing the things that I was supposed to do. So that year, 2017, pivotal moment for me because I decided to turn off all of my notifications, okay? Turned them all off. And to me, this is a big boundary moment. I don't remember why I did this. I wish I had some sort of resource to point to, but in my mind it was just a whim. I was like, you know what? We're turning this all off. I left text messages on and phone calls, so if there was an emergency, someone could text or call me because typically if it's emergency situation, the closest people to me had my phone number, but I turned off email, I turned off Facebook, Instagram, Twitter.

(04:10):
I turned it all off and I didn't just put it in do not disturb mode. I actually had to manually go in for each app and your iPhone and you have to toggle what kind of notifications you want. I turned them all off. Okay? Now, this did not immediately change my feelings around social media. In fact, I still was feeling like I was missing something, and so I was checking obsessively for a few months because I didn't want to miss anything. I didn't want to miss something huge, and I'm telling you it's not brain surgery. I'm not missing anything. There's no life or death situation here. So that was the first phase of this notification turning off situation. The second phase of this was that I relaxed a little bit too much and then I did start missing things. So I would forget to go check Twitter for a couple of days and then be like, oh, shoot, I didn't check my Twitter.

(05:11):
I better go to those notifications and check. And so after that point, I actually started treating myself like I would one of my clients, which I use Asana for project management. At the time when I had a very small team, I had every single task that I had to do for checking in with clients was on my to-do list. So I put all of that check client A is Twitter, check client B's, Instagram, check, client B's, Facebook. I had all of those in my Asana. I added myself in as a client, check my Twitter, check my Facebook, check my Instagram. So I started treating myself like a client, and then I got into a healthy habit of checking social media. Here's the thing, again, turning off my notifications didn't change how I felt about social media. It changed my behavior and my behavior eventually changed how I felt about social media.

(06:03):
I love social media. I have found some of the most beautiful connections that I have in my life on social media. And too much of a good thing can be bad. Too much of social media can lead to all sorts of feelings. There's tons of studies around this about how social media can change how we feel and our outlook on life. So I changed that and it changed my outlook on social media. And then recently my outlook on social media has changed again and again. I'm teasing this out because I'm going to talk more fully in the next episode, episode 300, but I just want to tease it out here because this episode is like a precursor to that, and I love social media. It's still my bread and butter is still what I do. My perspective on it has shifted and I am shifting with it.

(06:59):
Okay? The thing though that's at the foundation of all of this is social media, mindfulness, social media, mindfulness for business owners. And I think that's so important. When I think about the business owners I work with who are in this slump, typically they can't point to why they just feel like it's not working. They feel like they're being dragged along. They have very similar feelings to what I felt in 2017. And so why I preach the gospel of social media mindfulness, it's because social media is changing so much that if you try to do everything, you're going to get burned out. It is just a fact. You're going to get burned out, you're going to feel overwhelmed. You're going to feel like, oh boy, there's another app that I have to try. Great. Instead of being excited about it, you're going to feel obligation. And that obligation can lead to tons of negative feelings.

(08:00):
In fact, if you look at influencers or content creators, like the people who spend the most time creating content on social media, there is this wave of folks talking about how creator burnout has changed their output. There are people quitting YouTube. There are people taking breaks from their business sabbaticals. There are people, descaling is this word that keeps popping up, right? There are people who are cutting, but way back all because they're not practicing social media mindfulness and they're doing things that they feel obligated to do, and that leads to burnout. So what is a practice of social media mindfulness? I can't tell you exactly what you should be doing, but what I can tell you is that I believe firmly believe moderation is key here. And if it's not moderation, you may need to quit cold turkey for a while and then figure out how to navigate from there.

(09:00):
I was talking with a few business friends recently who have decided that social media is not for them. I think that's great. I think it's admirable. Social media is just one marketing tool. There's so many others. Now, I think my bias here, social media is one of the easier ones to do, but if you're not finding it easy, then maybe another tool will be a better fit for you. I also recognize that social media is just one tool, and oftentimes we have multiple tools in our marketing tool belt. We use them with different levels of frequency.

(09:33):
I also think that when we're practicing social media mindfulness, there's an awareness piece that's key here. We have to know how we feel about social media in order to even move forward. And what's interesting about this is I've been talking about this very publicly since, well, 2017 when I turned off my notifications, but in 2020, I released a meditation series around social media, still available. It's on any app, social media, unwind. You can find it anywhere. And the very first meditation is uncovering and unlocking your relationship with social media as a human and how you are aware of that relationship and helping you become aware of that relationship so that you can then go out and better understand how to use social media for yourself personally and for your business. And I think there's massive benefits for being mindful. I know that this sounds so like woo woo and out there, but when we get super intentional about social media, we have this sense of purpose and we show up in a different way.

(10:45):
And again, I see this happen not just with myself, with my clients, with these big name creators who took time off and they're doing things differently, and then they come back totally different sense of purpose. Instead of posting for the sake of posting, we're creating content with intent and intention. Instead of feeling like social media's not working, we have a deeper understanding of the actual impact that social media has on our business. There's a desire there to actually be present and show up and participate instead of checking off the box of, did I post a social media today? So we're taking a quick break. When we come back, I want to talk about some of the tactical things you can do to get out of your slump, but I hope this framed the social media mindfulness conversation framed where I'm coming from because it's not all about checking off all of these tactics. You really have to come at it with that mindset, when we get back.

(11:42):
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(12:50):
All right, tactics. The first one is ditch the idea that you have to post every day. This is something I've been talking a lot about in my community, in the Savvy Social School, in our private podcasts over there, because I used to teach it post five to seven times a week. I have the five pillars of content I used to talk about, rotate them, put one on every five weekday, and there you go. However, posting every day has become extremely exhausting because of the placements that we have available to us now. So for example, right now, if Instagram is a focus for you, Instagram reels and carousel posts are the posts that are performing well tactically, those are the rules. Of course, there's exceptions to the rules, but here now today, Q1 2024, that's what's working right now. Those posts take a lot of time to put together, and it is much more impactful to have one quality post than to try to rush five posts that week just for the sake of having five posts that week.

(14:05):
Okay? All right. So we're posting less, we're engaging more than we're posting. And this is why I like to use a time-based approach to social media versus an output-based approach. So an output based approach is leave five comments a day, a time-based approach is spend 10 minutes looking at where you can add comments. You see the difference? Five comments a day versus 10 minutes a day. When we use a time-based strategy is actually a lot easier for us as a human to complete the task. We said we were going to spend 10 minutes and we spent 10 minutes, whether that was five comments or 15, it's going to vary day by day, but we will release the shame of not checking off the box of five comments and trying to spend an hour trying to find something to say. And instead, we give ourselves time-based tactics and strategies.

(15:06):
And what happens is as you start leveraging this even more in your business, as you start using this even more in your business, you actually will get faster and you'll be able to produce more content in that time. You'll be able to engage more. And so we're posting less, we're engaging more, and who we are engaging with matters a whole hell of a lot. We want to connect with our people. We want to find our people and speak their language. And sometimes that means not going directly after them, but finding referrals. Who can shout the good word of our business? And I think about Stanley Cup in this example. So I'm not talking about the Hockey Stanley Cup, okay? I'm talking about Stanley Cup, the water tumbler, the one that has such a cult following, and it does because people made it important. So this was also very intentionally done by their CMO, but they've been a company since 1913.

(16:18):
Something changed in 2019, which is they went from being the cup for your blue collar worker to being the cup for every mom influencer on TikTok. And what changed was a mom influencer picked it up, saw the Stanley Cup, and went, this is amazing, shared it with the audience, and suddenly they're creating pink versions of this cup instead of hunter green or camo, right? That's because people is at the very center of that marketing strategy. The cup didn't change. It's still a cup that keeps your drinks hot or warm, right? The cup is still there. However, they focus on the people who are actually using the cup and said, how can we speak to them differently? So connecting with the right people that matters. They didn't go directly to start marketing to moms by creating ads for them. They instead had a mom influencer be their voice.

(17:23):
And that comes from relationships. Okay, next tactic. I want us to think about emphasizing the right thing. I talk about quality posting. I talk about engagement. I talk about people and community because sometimes we get so focused on these things, hashtags, posting times length of video, and those are so not even secondary or tertiary. So at the bottom of the list, yes, they can help. They help in a marginal way. But if you have content that's not quality, if you're not engaging with the right people, if you don't even know who your people are, it'll matter what hashtags you use, it's not going to work. It doesn't matter what time you post, it's not going to work. And so I think this concept of social media, mindfulness works best when we focus on the right things, not hashtags, not posting times, not length of video.

(18:19):
Another example of this is the recent series that went viral on TikTok, Reesa Teesa. Y'all know Reesa's story. 52 videos 10 minutes long. That shouldn't work. As a marketer. If someone told me that they're posting 52 videos, 10 minutes each about a story about how they basically married a con artist, I would say, how can we get this down to one 10 minute video? That's too long. It's too long. And yet each video has millions of views. And y'all, I watched 'em all for research. And also I liked the drama of it. I hope she gets some sort of Netflix series because it feels like something that would make a great movie, terrible thing to happen to her, but would make a great movie. No hashtags, no posting time. She posted them all within a couple of days. The length of the video should not have worked, and yet it worked.

(19:29):
Why? Because she had quality content that was engaging and it was directed at the right people in the right place, the right medium on TikTok nonetheless. So quality content and engaging content just trumps everything else you could post at the wrong time. You can use the wrong hashtags or no hashtags. You can not have a trending sound, and people will still find and connect with your video. All right, next tactic. Play in the long game. Y'all aren't going to like this one, but if you're feeling like you're in a slump, part of this is zooming out and instead of looking at, man, I didn't get as many followers this month as last month, it's going, man, I'm really setting the foundation for two years from now. So another story. I had a client who I found on LinkedIn. I actually spoke at an event, connected with him on LinkedIn.

(20:29):
It took two years before he became a client, okay? Two years before he became a client, even though we had been commenting on each other's LinkedIn posts for a while, that's the long game of it all. Sometimes it just takes time. And if we immediately need clients today or customers today, sometimes social media isn't it? Maybe it's going out and knocking on doors. Maybe it's whatever the case may be, but social media can be a really supporting actor in this long-term play of marketing in our business. All right, next tactic. Seeking the right mentors. I am a huge fan of this. So I have followed several people over the years, and there are so many people who teach marketing. In fact, there's a lot of brilliant marketers out here, brilliant marketers, and the best marketing strategies sometimes can lead you astray. And marketers, I'm going to call us out.

(21:35):
We're good at marketing. Okay? So if you feel like you're in a slump, it may be because you're following a tactic from a mentor who's implementing a strategy that just doesn't work for you and your business, for you and your business. Example, posting three to five times a day on TikTok, this is a tactic that was taught in the past. It actually did work really well. 20 20, 20, 21. But by 2022, that strategy started losing steam. It definitely does not work in 2024. There are still people out here teaching the strategy because it's what worked for them in 2020 and worked for them and their business. But most people, 90% of people who would start that strategy today, it would not work. One, we're churning out content. Two, we're really crowning the algorithm. Three, it is not sustainable for most business owners to produce that much content, and it's an outdated strategy.

(22:43):
We see videos all the time that take off has nothing to do with frequency and how often you post and everything to do with what you are posting. So the right mentor will help guide you in that. And also understanding that some people get stuck in their own box. I have to really focus on doing this myself, focusing on not doing this myself. Because if I'm seeing success in a certain vertical with myself or my clients, I tend to really lean into that. And I also want to recognize that sometimes other things work really well for other people. So for example, I still believe in micro video. Love it. And I was doing some consulting with someone who uses Facebook primarily, and they were thinking about branching off and doing other things, but in auditing their Facebook strategy, it's working. So why do we want to do other things?

(23:38):
Well, I feel like I should be on Instagram, or I feel like I should start a TikTok. And it's like, hold on, hold on, hold on. Yes, that could work for you, but do you have the time and energy to learn a new platform? No. Do you want to learn a new platform? No. Is Facebook working for you? Yes. Well, let's double down on Facebook. They're choosing their personal Facebook page to build their business, and it's working beautifully. So let's optimize that instead of trying something new. And that's how sometimes the right mentor can help keep you on the right track. That being said, I still recommend trying new things. So with this person, for example, let's experiment with Facebook reels. I recently had a client who had a million views, over a million views on a Facebook reel, Facebook reel. So we all see the reels, they pop up in our feed.

(24:23):
We did not follow them. They're just there hanging out. Now imagine your video posted there. They're hanging out. It could happen. It could happen. So the only way we'll know if it's something that we feel comfortable with is sometimes trying new things within reason. My favorite way to do this is to try a new feature of the current platform that you are on. Okay? So try a new feature of the current platform that you're on. I'm not saying go out and create a threads account today if you're on threads or if you're not on threads. I love it over there, but it is chaotic, and I don't necessarily always recommend it unless you check off a few other boxes first. You don't have to go over there. And if that sounds like a relief to you, great. But wherever you are, let's say you're on LinkedIn, maybe try doing some LinkedIn collaboration articles or maybe try writing a LinkedIn newsletter. Try some of the things that are on the platform. You're currently on the last tactic to get you out of this slump. So we talked about focusing on quality, engaging with people, engaging with the right people, emphasizing the right things, playing the long game, following the right mentors, trying some experiments. All of those things will get you out of a slump. But if none of that works, it may be you.

(25:52):
I hate to say this, but sometimes social media just isn't for you. And I hear this a lot of times with my clients. They started it. They're happy with some of the results, and they recognize, this is not for me. I need someone else to do it. And it's okay to say that. And then outsource. You can outsource your social media, simple things all the way from outsourcing a couple of graphics and captions, or even just finding an assistant who can post for you all the way up to an agency who's full service, who can cover the whole thing for you, and you don't have to think about it, right? Whatever is in your capacity, your budget right now, you can outsource something. You don't have to do it yourself if it's not for you. And even if it's not something you can do today, it can go on the vision board.

(26:44):
This was accounting and bookkeeping for me. I am not a big numbers person. Maths. I can do it if I have a calculator and a lot of time, probably a spreadsheet. It's just not my favorite thing in the world to do. And so I love reviewing the report at the end of the day for my bookkeeper, but it is a relief to have someone else do that for me. They can break down each category and tell me how I'm doing on my goals. And I'm like, yeah, that sounds great. I'll see you next month. And so it's not for me. And that may be social media for you. It may not be something that you want to consistently do. You can outsource it, and that can sometimes get you out of a creative slump because now you have support in doing the things that are really dragging you down, and you can show up in a way that's delightful for you.

(27:36):
For example, we just bought on a new client who likes recording videos, has a whole bunch of videos, but if she has to add those captions to the videos, the burned in ones, or write the copy that goes with the video, upload it, pick a sound, figure out when to post it, figure out how to connect it to her launch. She just doesn't want to do all of that. She just wants to record the video. That's where my team and I come in. We take the videos, we even send her ideas. Hey, here's something that's trending. Can you record this? She's like, great. I get to just record it. I don't even have to think about it. Right? So when we think about the social media slum, you may be just trying to do all the tasks, video editor, caption writer, community manager, when all you want to do is be the content creator. It may be time to outsource. Okay? So I hope this episode helped you move the needle. Get out of your social media slum. I'm so excited for the next episode. It's episode 300. Ah, oh my gosh. I am like, anyways, tune in next week because I have a huge announcement. I will see you then. Bye for now.