Want to get off social media or spend less time and energy creating content there? We had a conversation about this in the Emerge + Expand membership recently, so I thought I’d share with you a snippet of the chat where I shared some different  strategies, ideas, and platforms to try away from the usual Instagram, Facebook, and other big social spaces.

In this episode, I also talk about:

– The number one thing to think about when deciding where you want to put your energy.
– Why creating community is vital to your business but WHERE you do that is less relevant
– A few ideas that you might not even be thinking about for sharing your work
– And my controversial opinion that social media has made us lazy when it comes to marketing and advertising because it’s easy.

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Also Mentioned In This Episode:

FULL TRANSCRIPT:

This is the Emerge and Expand Podcast episode five. And today I’m sharing with you a great question that came up in the Emerge and Expand Membership last month around which social media platform you should start with and ultimately led to a conversation about what to do when you aren’t really that interested in being on social media and sharing your work in that way. We talk so much about different strategies, different ideas for what you can do if social media is just not your thing and I decided that I wanted to share a snippet of this conversation with you on the podcast, because I know this is a conversation that I definitely have a lot, and it’s something that people ask me about all the time. So this episode has come out of the membership. It has been edited to protect the anonymity of the group members, but it does contain some of my thoughts, ideas, suggestions that I shared in that call. 

If you’re interested in the Emerge and Expand Membership after listening to this, and you wanna join in on the conversation, get access to some amazing trainings, tools, resources in the on demand content library, and also join us in a private off social media community. The doors are open this month for Emerge and Expand. It is a low entry point membership where you get access to coaching and coworking and monthly trainings as well. If you’re interested and you wanna learn more, please head to emerge and expand.com or shoot me a message on Instagram @miss_kms and let’s chat about whether it is right for where you’re at right now in your business. And with all of that being said, I hope that you enjoy this conversation and it gives you something to think about. 

The question was, “Do you have any suggestions on choosing a social platform to start with, what should I be thinking about when I’m making a decision?” Such a great question. I always think of it like, where do I wanna build a community? Where do I enjoy showing up? It’s a, like an, I, I mean, I don’t believe anything in business is like, you must do this or you’ll never be successful. The way that I think about it is you have to do something in terms of whether it’s, you know, building a community in whatever that looks like is a way to get people to know your work, how you do that though. There’s like a “choose your own adventure”, different ways to do that. There’s so many avenues, even still without that, that you can go down that don’t look like, oh, I have to post, you know, five times a week on Instagram and still not get seen because of how much noise there is there. 

But the thing that I always think about is like, Why am I doing this? Because I think I should be doing it? Or am I doing it because I genuinely am interested in showing up in this space? So there’s a board in The Content Ecosystem part, which I can link to everyone, but it’s got 80 plus ideas for ways that you can share your work, share where you’re showing up, invite people to join your mailing list and things without being on social media, you know, in terms of like building community, building engagement, like social media platforms, there is really a social element to it that we have to be aware of in our energy and in deciding what we’re gonna do do with that. So in this board, it’s called the antisocial board. It is in the third section of the content ecosystem part in the group for ways to share your work, share where you’re showing up on places, share, you know, those guest interviews, those guest posts, all of that sort of thing without using social media platforms. 

I do mention Pinterest in here and that’s because I don’t really consider Pinterest to be a social media platform. I definitely think of it more as a search engine. And so, so even just like going, okay, that might be of interest like playing around with that. I mentioned search quite a bit in terms of like, if you’re writing blog posts, you know, learning a little bit about SEO to make sure that your content is in is following the, the system. If you’re on WordPress, the Yoast SEO plugin is free, but for anyone, even if you’re not, that website, I learnt more about SEO from that website than anywhere else. So I highly recommend it if you’re wanting to rank on Google and make sure that your content is optimised for SEO, that website, I think it’s just yoast.com is a wealth of information you can also see and almost replicate the way that they write their pillar content, the way that they write their kind of big blog posts that then link to other posts, you can see how they do it and learn by, you know, what, watching. 

I always think, if I’m learning a new skill, I always look at not what the person is necessarily teaching, but what they are doing. Because so often we can see things that people, when they’re explaining a process, maybe don’t think about because it’s just obvious to them. So I always like to watch what someone who’s an expert in their area is actually doing to learn like little nuanced things that you don’t necessarily get taught specifically when someone’s teaching a process, thinking about what are ways that exactly like you said, with being a guest on a podcast or a guest poster that you can even get in front of people who are your ideal audience without having to be doing it on social media. So inviting people to join your list when you, you know, having that in every bio at, in your signature, your email signature, I think there’s a whole section I’ve got in here somewhere about like making sure that you’re putting how someone can join your community as many places as possible. 

I think the thing I said this in a group once and everyone was like, you’re a dick. I got such a pushback on it. Social media has made us really lazy because it’s so easy. And the pushback I got was I was – it was an introvert business group as well – and they were like, “It’s not easy, what are you talking about?” It actually is really easy because never before have we had communal spaces where people since spend significant amount of time scrolling, looking, searching, using those platforms in like a dedicated space, in a global community of 8 billion people like to know that people are communing in these spaces and we can show up there and we have a potential for people to see our work that never would’ve come across us is amazing, but it’s made us really lazy because it’s so easy. So it’s kind of going okay, if I’m not, if I’m gonna not do that, what am I gonna do instead? 

Am I gonna pitch myself for guest posting and podcast interviews? And then how am I gonna show up for that community? Give amazing value and then have that really clear call to action. I would almost make that if you’re gonna do it, make that a big part of your personal branding and messaging of like, Hey, I’m not on social media, so you can’t find me there, but make sure you come over to my website and join my mailing list because of that is where I’m building my community and giving all of my value. So thinking about it like that, if the idea of even doing that starts to feel like, oh gosh, I don’t really wanna do that. And then it’s like, fine. What, what else can you try if you are enjoying being on other people’s podcasts. And again, if you’ve been in this community for a while, you’ll know that I constantly say, I think everyone should have a podcast. 

Audio is one of the easiest ways for people to access our work. And you know, maybe you start thinking about, Hey, I need to build community in a different way that isn’t on social media. I’m gonna do that by having deeper, meaningful conversations with other sensitive souls about their work. And as a result, get access to their community, get in front of their people who some of those people might be my people too. And at the end, always having a call to action. Hey, if you enjoy this, make sure you subscribe and come over and grab my free guide that is very specifically or, or free something that’s very specifically tailored to the audience that that podcast kind of is going to attract. And then there’s things like, like I said, ads and sponsorships, which might be a little bit right now, but stuff to think about that running ads on people’s podcasts Buzzsprout, which is where I host my podcast has a program that you can sign up to and they will match you with podcasts that are directly related to your audience. 

You could reach out to people who you, you listen to their podcast and say, Hey, do you have a sponsorship program for your podcast? YouTubes, you know, people who are creating content and already have built an audience, it is so afford. Like when you think about things like TV advertising and print advertising. If we had had business 10, 15, 20 years ago, it would be completely inaccessible to be able to advertise on platforms where people are actively engaged TV advertising. You know, we’re talking hundreds of thousands and millions of dollars to get an ad on TV and print is, is still out like outrageously overpriced for how little people are watching commercial TV. These days you can run Google ads. I’m sure Google has in their Google university, ways that you can run ads like a 32nd ad at the start of someone’s YouTube video specific, you can pick which channels like this is how specific you can get and say, this is amazing YouTuber who has a million followers and talks about highly sensitive people. 

I’m gonna just advertise to her audience or his audience. And you put a little 32nd ad at or 15 second ad at the front. And it costs like dollars, you know, like not a lot of money. So that’s the thing it’s like, it’s infinite. It’s just about what are you willing to do? That is maybe a little bit out of the box compared to how easy it is to just like show up and post stuff on Instagram or Facebook. But yeah, there are so like there’s many, many ideas here for things to try, and this is more of like a read through it and feel within yourself, that little spark that goes, Ooh, maybe I, maybe that’s something I could try or it sparks another idea that I haven’t come up with, cuz I’m not, I don’t have all the ideas, but there’s a bunch here that hopefully will even just spark some ideas of what you might be interested in doing. 

I would generally say, if you are sitting here going, I don’t wanna be on social media. It is not where I wanna pull my energy that you follow that and then go, okay, what do I want to do? What am I willing to do? What is exciting to me about sharing my work with the world? The, the game is yours to play. The rules are, there are no rules as long as you know, I mean abide by the human rules of like, be, be kind and look after each other. But like really the more creative you can be, the more you’re gonna find the thing that, that lights you up and listening to what other people are doing. And ideas that they’ve got is a really great way to start feeling into like, oh, I don’t wanna do that, but I might wanna do that. 

Text messaging is like the, the next big thing, because people don’t want any more junk in their emails in their inboxes. We’ll spend already way too much time in there. I talked about this, I think last month when we got into like a really deep dive about memberships and subscriptions and things, a really cool membership that a past client of mine has started up is a text message membership. The platform think it’s called hello daily. And all people have to do is they just pop their mobile number in and you get a little text message that then is like here, click here and you click the link and you can listen to the audio. So even as like a free platform, that could be a cool way to get. I mean like you have to build trust. So you have to, to find a way to build trust with people. 

And you might do that via your email and then add on something like that after cuz I feel like giving out your phone number is another level of, I don’t wanna get spanned, but you know, again, endless, endless possibilities of how you build community and for people who are more highly sensitive, like your people are, maybe they are more interested in a community that is you showing up for them without them having to do so much engagement. But you don’t really know until you sort of start to, to try thi maybe it is building a little community where you get to chat with people who are also highly sensitive and not on social media and find somewhere you can build your own discord server that is essentially like a group community. There’s so much cool stuff that you can do with discord. There’s no ads, there’s no, you know, social noise that we see on Facebook and Instagram. 

It is fully yours. When we’re thinking about social media, like what does that mean for us? Is it that we wanna be away from the noise and all the marketing and stuff on platforms like Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, or is it that we just wanna not be having to be plugged into things and also identifying those things as well. And then thinking about like, this is a question that I ask myself all the time I’ve been running Facebook ads this month. I hate the fact that I have to give my money to Facebook. It makes me really sad, but also a part like it’s finding that balance of, but this is what I’m trying right now because this is where the curiosity is of like, okay, what would happen if I tried that? And I think as business owners, if we can get really in love with just the ideas and the like, oh, maybe I could give that a go. 

Maybe I’ll try that out this month. Really thinking about that as the, the most like as a value or a skill that we can cultivate more so than like being really good at marketing or being really good at writing copy of just being curious about where are my people, you know, if your people aren’t on social media, it makes very little sense for you to be at the end of the day, building community is about connection with other people who are like-minded and have like-minded, you know, ideals and values and traits and things that they’re passionate and care about. Building community can be, can happen anywhere. It can happen in person. It can happen on a Zoom call. It can happen in a Facebook group. It can happen in a WhatsApp text chain. It’s just about what do you wanna try and what feels like something that sparks your curiosity. 

My advice that I give to every single person about every single question, go into something because you’re interested in it. You’re curious about it. You are excited by the possibilities instead of, oh, I feel like I should be doing this because you know, sometimes we can stumble upon things that we might have never given a shot, but most of the time it ends up being like, yeah, that’s not, that was just like a, a lot of energy for something I didn’t really wanna do in the first place. So much about what feels right for you. Because the last thing that we wanna do is build a business that we hate. And so let’s start as we mean to continue. If the energy’s not there for social, for Instagram, whatever that might be, where is it and what are you excited to do? 

And I decided that I wanted to end the conversation with that question for you as well. If you are someone who finds social media exhausting, or that it’s just not somewhere that you’re interested in showing up and putting your energy, what is it? Where is it that you’re interested in creating content, showing up, building your community, creating opportunities that you can do this more. I would love to put that idea out there and give you something to think about, to take away from, if you are interested in checking out the rest of the antisocial trier board, that’s got over 80 ideas for things that you can do that aren’t related to social media, as well as the entire Content Ecosystem that has social media planning, repurposing what to do with old content that can turn into digital products, into programs, into other content so that you can make the most of your energy. 

That is a free bonus when you join emerge and expand, but you can also buy that separately thecontentecosystem.com. And if not, that’s no worries either because this is the kind of stuff I talk about here on the podcast. So make sure that you subscribe, leave a rating and review if you enjoyed it. And let me know, is there anything else that you would like to know about? Do you have any other questions that have come from this conversation or would you like to know more about Emerge and Expand the membership where you can come and join us and get your questions answered as well? If you had to emerge and expand.com/podcast, oh, oh five. You’ll be able to grab the full transcript, the show notes and the links to both the Emerge and Expand membership and The Content Ecosystem. If you’re interested in checking those out further, otherwise I’ll catch you in the next episode.