Being Your Own Boss: The Busywork of Social Media
This is the third essay in a four-part series.
The one aspect of working for myself that shifted the most over the last six years is social media, and by extension, advertising and self-promotion.
Last week, I noted the variety of back-office roles you assume when going into business for yourself. Add becoming the head of your marketing team to that list. What, you have no experience in marketing? Doesn’t matter, the job is yours!
In the first 12 – 18 months of being self-employed, I wasted far too much time with my online presence.
Let’s go back to July of 2017. After determining my initial offerings and services, I created a website, hit publish and promptly left for a three-day vacation to avoid the temptation of watching my analytics in real time. I know myself well.
There are too many vanity metrics and out-of-your-control metrics you can get lost in if you do not have a clear goal for your social media/website presence. That is where I found myself in year one.
A Web(site) of Busy Work
Web design is not my forte. Luckily, I learned a little bit from friends and colleagues, enough to be dangerous, as they say. My website content and pages underwent more costume changes than a cabaret host. Every time a small change occurred in my business, it was immediately reflected on my site.
I was very reactive. Many of the updates I made were removed a short time later. Making for poor SEO practice and racking up the hours sunk into a site because I had no clear objective.
Updating my website became a weekly part of my new life.
I do not mean adding a new blog post or video, I mean making changes to my site. The very definition of busy work. What I had not really considered was what purpose a website served for a person in my role, which at the time was a consultant and facilitator.
Was my site where potential clients could discover me?
Was it the last stop, the place that answered their questions and solidified interest?
Was it an informative stop in the buying process that fell somewhere between the two?
This was an important step I skipped. The intention for a website is clearly not the same for an online retail store compared to a person offering copy edit services or a small organization building a business network. To me, I had checked the box that said “get a website”, and found myself with a shiny new distraction.
Besides having no background in web design nor a clear objective for my site, I had a larger issue holding me back: I am deeply uncomfortable with self-promotion.
The first essay in this series is where I mentioned how this inability made networking painful, until I learned a new approach that took self-promotion out of the equation. As you will see, I eventually found a new approach online that is both genuine and avoids self-promotion.
Not-So-Social Media
The reason self-employed people engage in social media is because it is free advertising. It gives us business owners the sense that countless clients are waiting with bated breath to discover that we and we alone, are the solution to their problems.
In 2018 my Instagram feed was a perfectly curated grid (remember those?).
I loved playing with images, using them as prompts to write posts that were too long for Twitter. The images were always in hues of teal because – branding!
You may ask yourself, what does a perfectly crafted grid of images have to do with consulting?
Absa-freaking-loutely nothing. It has nothing to do with running a consulting business. The posts I made were simply lesser knock-offs of the social media people I like the least: influencers.
I attempted to blend the aesthetics of influencer posts with actual insightful commentary and topical content. It was a hot mess. Before deploying a stream of teal-coloured imagery into the ether, I forgot to ask myself, to what purpose?
Now, I could continue with more and more examples of aimless social media posts I made to various platforms but let’s get to the point. Did I receive engagement? Yes. Did I earn sales? Nope.
I did earn myself significant mental exhaustion. For the most part, social media was another item on the never ending to do list. The hamster wheel I couldn’t jump off and one that felt so phoney (to me) that the experience was overwhelmingly negative.
With one exception. LinkedIn.
LinkedIn was the sole platform that generated new business for me. Before I continue, remember, this is not an advice column. I’m not about to drop some algorithm hack explaining how to game LinkedIn. The truth is far simpler.
For a sole proprietor offering business services, this was the network that reflected my strengths and gave me the most reach because I spent years building connections and demonstrating the value I brought to others before I set out on my own. It was the platform I invested in the most. I engaged and grew several different networks based on my three core areas of subject matter expertise. It is where I posted original longform articles; where I engaged with others and learned of relevant events.
The fact remains, social media platforms are excellent at making us feel the need to be seen and are a hidden cost of working for yourself.
How to Not Advertise
I never bought a single online advertisement. The reason seemed obvious enough at the time: my business offerings were evolving and it made no sense to spend actual money on advertising.
Contrast that clear cut decision with the hours and hours I was simultaneously wasting on social media. It makes zero sense. My employee brain and business owner brain are nothing if not irreconcilable. At the time, I wasn’t equating time spent to money spent.
The only money spent on advertising went towards some business cards and related physical media for workshops. Even then, I was reactionary. I had three different business card designs in 18 months. First, they were super cheap to produce thanks to Vistaprint. Second, I never felt they effectively demonstrated what I offered. See above, my website. It was so ridiculous and illogical. A complete contrast to who I am professionally that it is embarrassing to reflect on.
The upside? When the day came for me to assess the past and start again, they burned up nicely in our fireplace.
Then vs Now
The clarity I have with regards to my business today is reflected across my website, social media and promotional activities.
My clients are rarely complete strangers. We’ve met, or they know me from my essays/videos or are referrals.
I’m not running a retail business nor a volume-based business. I also have no desire to work fulltime at the moment as I am following other pursuits.
Knowing this changes everything.
My website is not perfect, I’m still the designer after all, but it is designed for where I am at today and where I want to be in the future. I’m clear on what services I offer, and the topics I cover. I am not trying to be everything to everyone.
The only regular changes to content are updates to my blog and video pages.
I intentionally added friction between potential clients and myself. My old web design included my email address in the footer, resulting in daily emails from web scrapes offering me B2B lists or merchandising opportunities. Today, people reaching out to me are clear on why they are connecting because the easy, 2-step process guides them to be so.
My social media presence is quite restricted compared to 2017.
LinkedIn remains my primary platform for client-facing posts. It may be where you discovered this essay, or where you see my videos. Occasionally I may post via my business page on Facebook, or add a video to Instagram or TikTok, but truthfully, they are not valuable platforms for the niche I currently am in, nor do I see the value (yet) for them to support my other pursuits.
I do use Threads and Substack to promote my creative writing (which is predominantly regarding the horror genre). Rarely do I cross-post between those and LinkedIn/my website. As the Ghostbusters warned us, “do not cross the streams. It would be bad.”
There are still days where my analytics brain goes a little haywire and freaks out over the metrics, but the feeling passes soon enough. Mine isn’t an ad-supported online presence - I do not require a huge amount of reach or engagement to sustain what I do. One or two client engagements a month is all I need.
A post that generates 10 likes and one sale is more valuable for my business than a post that garners hundreds of likes or comments and no sale.
Which brings me to my least favourite part of self-employment: self-promotion.
I am really, really bad at it. To counter my lack of promotional talent, I opt to show rather than tell.
My two blogs help me maintain a writing habit and try out different voices and styles of storytelling. My videos allow me to demonstrate my instructional delivery style and experiment with more personal and/or comedic deliveries. They are recorded in one or two takes. I’m not a media company after all, and production design isn’t in my wheelhouse.
Both the videos and blog are my primary driver of new business at the moment.
Best of all, as they are genuine expressions of who I am and what I do – the whole experience is far more enjoyable.
I wrap up this series on self-employment by reflecting on my support team and the vulnerability of going solo.
