There is something to be said for taking a break from social media.
It’s almost a nice little respite, a vacation if you will, from the world around you. It’s living in your own bubble and focusing on the life in front of you, not worrying about whether this moment is Instagram worthy or something to be shared with all of your “friends” on Facebook.
If you haven’t done it in a while, then I highly recommend it.
This is where I was mentally…on a beautiful beach, isolated in a little hut with no WiFi
There is one problem though, which may not be a problem for most, but when your life and your business revolves around social media, it is the living breathing entity that literally pays for your groceries and the roof over your head…at some point, you have to go back.
To be clear, it’s not that I haven’t been on social media at all for the past couple of months – but I haven’t been posting as ME.
I dipped out of Instagram all together for a while – worried I wasn’t getting my brand just right. Then I stopped posting anything organic on my own business Facebook page…it became a beautifully branded page – but not terribly exciting, with little to nothing organic and authentic.
Here is the insane part of all of this…while I understand that taking a break from social media is actually good and healthy, as a business person it can be suicide. I tell my clients this ALL THE TIME. I legit will have conversations about how you need to post more organic content, how they need to send me more information about their businesses to create more high quality, authentic and true to their business content, not just pretty images we create and articles we find for them.
I. KNOW. ALL. THIS.
But yet I have been stalling. Paralyzed by the worry that maybe my brand isn’t just right, that maybe my message will be off just a little, that maybe the worry of being not perfect enough will cause a backlash of some imaginary sort. It is a paralysis of analysis and it’s held me in its grip as I rationalize that I am too busy with my client’s pages and accounts…I don’t have time to work on my own business’s social media presence.
That of course is crap.
It is really about the “compare to despair” situation that Cara Alwill Leyba so accurately talks about in her book Girl Code. (Excellent book by the way.) And that is also why so many people categorize social media as the devil in the room. It causes us to focus on everyone else and shifts our focus from the everyday to creating a “perfect version” of the everyday. One that is truly unsustainable and honestly, who wants to be perfect all the time? Not me – being perfectly imperfect is my every day motto, so why not be that imperfect me on social?
I have Facebook live moments where my son comes running in as I’m attempting to explain a complicated situation or technique, or I don’t speak exactly to a script…often I come up with my Facebook live subject mere moments before I go live because that is the most pressing topic at the moment. Yet I stalled on Instagram…and stopped posting the fun part of my job. I kept it under wraps, seemingly just for me.
That was good and bad. See, I want to enjoy with others the insanity of business. It’s not all cupcakes and rainbows and navigating social media is at times a CHORE. It can be hard – a Facebook ad may fail. A picture or video may totally flop. But that’s OKAY. It’s all a part of your brand and really, there is nothing that cannot be deleted.
There is only one main rule that I have when posting on social media. If you wouldn’t say that to a person’s face, then you best not say it at all. Social media may be getting a bad rep right now, but it’s not the tool, it’s the people behind it. I pledge to use my knowledge to share and educate and to spread kindness. Because if we are being honest, social media needs a bit more happy sparkle and a little less hatred out there right now.
So, I’m back, I’m excited and ready to spread a bit of happiness and social media knowledge – because, damn, did I learn a lot on my hiatus!