Does ‘Social Mediaing’ Feel Like A Struggle?

Written by Ursula Hurn, Digital Organizer

Best known for her skill in digital organization, Ursula Hurn is the creator of the IG OrganiSZer®, a simple yet effective social media content management system. She teaches best practices for digital organization and how to implement her systems. She has over 30 years of digital organizational experience and offers practical application.

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“Oh damn, it’s already Wednesday and I haven’t created a single Instagram post this week yet!” Sound like you? You are not alone in the constant battle to create the next piece of social media content to promote your business. Many business owners feel like this, especially small business owners, managing their own social media.

Why is it such a struggle?

There are many reasons why social media content creation feels like a burden, and our response to the thought of it is: “This is just hard and a struggle!” Yet we all persist, being more or less successful at maintaining a consistent presence. The reason we continue is because it’s free in the sense that it doesn’t take money out of our pocket and it gets us and our businesses out into the world, where someone is likely to see what we’re offering and may be interested. It’s not free in the sense that it takes up valuable time, which often could be better spent making sales calls or dealing with customers or clients.

Some of the main reasons we feel it’s a struggle include:

1. Time: As small business owners, time is something we are always short of and if we don’t have support staff, the pressure is far greater. Adding into the mix deciding what to prioritize and sticking to deadlines, creates consistent pressure.

2. Inspiration: Consistently creating new content can lead to creative fatigue and a lack of inspiration, often feeling like we’ve said it all or everyone’s heard it all before and we can’t come up with a new angle on the ‘thing’ we’re promoting.

3. Failure: Being concerned about the value of the content we’re creating can lead to hesitance in creating and posting content because we feel it won’t be up to scratch and we’ll disappoint our audience and they will stop following us.

4. Engagement: When our audience likes and engages with our content, responding to everyone can take a fair amount of time, but the danger of not engaging with your audience is that you’ll lose them, so it needs to be maintained. A further pressure on an already limited time.

5. Platforms: The social media platforms are constantly changing both the algorithms as well as the content formats they require, which can leave us feeling like we’re never going to win we thought we just got all the answers and then they changed all the questions.

6. Purpose: If we have no strong purpose nor a clear strategy, trying to create a presence on social media can feel very overwhelming and we get discouraged at the thought of starting the journey.

7. Perfection: Always wanting to make sure everything is perfect will prevent us from posting consistently. We may create the content and then never post it because ‘it’s just never quite good enough’.

The important things

For all of the above reasons, we become inconsistent with posting to social media, and that is the one thing that will hinder our engagement and growth probably more than any of the others.

Consistency is the one thing that will keep us growing. Consistently showing up for our audience is what keeps them engaged and happy to hang around. Some followers may hang around for literally years without ever commenting or liking anything and when the time is right for them, they will get in touch and buy from you, seemingly out of the blue.

Responding to and interacting with our followers will also keep them engaged. If they comment on a post and you never bother to reply, it’s like someone talking to you and you just outright ignoring them, if someone did that to you, you wouldn’t hang around, would you? Neither will they.

Whatever content you are going to post, be genuine. Come from the heart, be honest, be passionate about what you are selling, because if you’re not, your followers won’t be either. Followers can smell disingenuity a mile away. If you’re not ‘feeling it’ either, don’t post because that energy will come through your post, or find a piece of content you’ve previously created that has value and repost that. Repurposing content is a great way to save time.

Tips to overcome the ‘social mediaing’ struggle

1. Have a plan

Planning social media content ahead of time combats several of the issues that cause the struggles mentioned above.

1. Time: Prioritise specific time blocks every week, in which you will create your social media content and stick to them. Plan to create at least 3 pieces of content that can be posted across several platforms, create once, and post in several places. Doing it that way will gradually allow you to build up content for future posting.

2. Inspiration: Planning your content will save frustration when creating the content because you will know exactly what you are going to be creating content for. You will never again think: “What am I going to post about today?”

3. Purpose: Figure out why you are wanting to post to social media and develop a strategy for posting. Monitor the content and see what does well and what doesn’t and post more of what does well.

4. Consistency: Planning your content will allow you to show up consistently as it will stop being ‘hard and a struggle’ to do so.

Read related article: A Simple Social Media Strategy

2. Provide value

There are so many millions of people on social media posting every day, if you are not providing value, you are less likely to grow your following or find potential customers. Give more than you receive. When you give lots of free value, followers engage and become interested in what value you would provide to them through your paid products or services. Providing value also builds trust and confidence that you know what you are talking about.

Providing value addresses these issues:

1. Failure: Providing value will address the fear of failure. You know your field, talking confidently about your field of expertise builds your own confidence.

2. Engagement: Followers will always engage with your content when you are providing value, so keep doing that.

3. Repurposing: When you are planning your content, this also gives you the opportunity to repurpose content because you know you are providing value. Remember, there are always new people seeing your content; it’s not always just the people who follow you.

4. Platforms: Providing value overcomes the changes made to the algorithms. If viewers are engaging with your content, the algorithms will send it out to more people, you needn’t worry about that. Keep providing value, it works.

3. Be imperfectly perfect

You’re perfect just the way you are. You’re human like the rest of us, you have bad hair days, get out of bed on the wrong side, and make spelling mistakes we all do. That’s part of being genuine and relatable in social media, why people get to like, know and trust you.

Being imperfectly perfect also deals with some of the issues we struggle with.

1. Time: Done is better than perfect, always! Do one take, not 10. Be proud you showed up.

2. Inspiration: Imperfection often provides inspiration for new content or can provide you with that different angle you were looking for.

3. Failure: Learn to laugh at your own mistakes, you will come across as more genuine, trustworthy and likeable. Obviously, if you’re talking facts, make sure you get those right.

4. Engagement: Followers will engage more readily when they can relate to you in some way or other, something they recognize in themselves.

5. Repurposing: If you’ve created content and it’s not quite to your liking, you can change it so that it’s better and reuse it.

Ready to overcome the struggle?

The overwhelm created by the thought of ‘social mediaing’ is real and many small business owners struggle with it because there is so much pressure to be out there. If you have a plan and a strategy, it is far easier to manage, and it’s about getting into a rhythm of regular content creation, posting, and maintaining that. If you're ready to take action and overcome the struggle, book a free ‘coffee’ call today. Let's see how we can work together on your Social SmartStart Plan to break you free from the struggle of ‘social mediaing’ and turn it into plain sailing for you.

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Read more from Ursula Hurn

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Ursula Hurn, Digital Organizer

Ursula Hurn is an expert in digital organization and systems. Being a lover of people, she understands the frustration and time-wasting that digital disorganization causes, especially when business owners don't believe it's a skill they can learn! With a burning desire to help SMEs succeed, her student and client base is international, and she believes everyone has the ability to get digitally organized. She is only as far as a Zoom call away.