My Experiences with Social Media

I was off Instagram for almost 5 years, from age 18 to 22, because I did not enjoy the scroll. Then, upon graduating college, I had the idea for Beach Bum Poet, which I decided was a solid enough reason to break my exodus from the app. I started my blog and posted about my writing on Instagram with the idea that I’d help my writing grow. It didn’t get me too far, but I liked it well enough to stick around (I was, and am, 95% motivated by cute animal content to keep going back on my personal IG account). I started Beach Bum Creative in 2022, and a brand-new business Instagram account came with that.

Then, upon starting Beach Bum Creative in January 2022, I was committed to growing my business, which led me to jump on the Reels train. But I started seeing I was forcing myself to put out a higher volume of content than I felt comfortable with, negatively affecting my mindset, workflow, and quality. Spending several hours each week or month producing reels content was not only time-consuming but draining. Which made me wonder, “What got me started making reels in the first place?”

Getting Real about Reels

There were a few reasons, some helpful and some less so. Anxiety was the first impetus behind reels. I was nervous that if I didn’t “keep up,” something bad might happen (who knows what). Once I started playing around with reels, my motivation came from joy… reels are kind of fun to make if you let yourself play around with them. Once I got that initial buzz of serotonin from seeing my posts do well, I began to get consumed by my numbers and metrics.

I’d check my stats all day after posting a new reel, wondering why one performed better than the other and questioning if it was any good in the first place. Instagram started giving me that old, strange feeling unique to our digital time, a feeling which had led me to get off the app in the first place: that peculiar blend of supreme boredom and hyper-stimulation.

Giving Myself Permission to Take a Break

My fiancé and I had two back-to-back trips coming up, and my original plan had been to record a bunch of drafts before we flew out and post them at regular intervals throughout my trip. And I recorded them, but when it came time to post and write a caption, I simply could not press “Post.” While fun and trendy, the reels I’d made didn’t excite me to share. There wasn’t anything about them I genuinely loved. Posting had become a chore rather than an opportunity.

And that is when I realized that “quitting” Instagram might be the best thing for myself and my business because forcing myself to use the platform was, I saw now, degrading my content and my joy around it. Your copy is what matters most when you’re a copywriter, and the fact that I had no passion or interest in writing captions for my post told me it was time to re-set and re-evaluate just precisely what Instagram was doing to and for me.

This got me thinking more about goals, creativity, sharing and promoting my business. Here’s what I came up with.

Why am I posting to social media?

I was posting because I thought, “This is what successful businesses do, and I want to be successful!” Then I realized there are all types of successful businesses out there and that confining my definition of success to metrics on a platform wasn’t serving me. It was just driving me crazy as I tried to figure out what would do well and what wouldn’t. I was getting so bogged down and discouraged with the performance of my posts.

You may not be like me in that way, but I’ve heard from several of my clients how challenging social media can be for them for various reasons. Asking yourself, at the core, why you’re posting to social media can help you discern whether it’s genuinely helping or simply hindering you.

For whom am I posting?

When I thought about this, I could clearly see that my social media is for fellow business owners. I wanted to provide high-value, informative content that speaks to my business and skill set. This helped me stop focusing so much on my metrics and look more closely at the type of information I was putting out. It honed my focus so I knew I could measure value based on my audience and business rather than numbers on a graph.

What is my long-term goal with social media?

Asking myself this question made me realize that I didn’t know my long-term goal. It showed me that part of the reason I was feeling so discouraged about posting was that I didn’t know what my overall plan was. It pushed me to re-focus and re-evaluate why my social media accounts exist. Because social media, when it has a goal and a strategy behind it, becomes a tool and opportunity. Without a goal or strategy, social media can become just another item on the long list of to-dos all of us small business owners are so familiar with.

How can I make social media serve me?

This is the biggest question I had to look at for myself and my business. How do I reposition social media as the tool it could be, rather than the drag and drain it had begun to feel like?

What I came up with was totally simple but definitely helped me :

1. Spend less time on my reels
2. Get off the app unless it’s to post
3. Unfollow high-profile creator accounts

Spend Less Time on Reels

Creating reels can be a fun, creative process that lets you get playful, dramatic, and silly for your audience. Reels are supposed to be REAL, not perfect. I'm not saying put out low-grade content, but allow yourself to create without rules or excessive editing. Set it and forget it! I decided to spend less time on my reels because I was outputting much more than I was getting back. The more time I spent on reels, the more discouraged I felt when they flopped.

As I spent less time obsessing over reels creation, I understood it wasn't the reels creation process which drained me most, but the entire experience of the app itself.

Get Off the App Unless it's To Post

In all honesty, I just downloaded Candy Crush and started playing that every time the urge to check my stats came up. Or I'd read, journal, stare out the window... do some yoga, anything except going back to scrolling. Because I wasn’t just overwhelmed by my Instagram account, but everyone's.

Unfollow High-Profile Creator Accounts

My feed was filled with tips, tricks, and recommendations. Do this, add a CTA, “10 Ways to Go Viral”, “How to make money with Instagram” … I was hyper-stimulated and totally bored with the same messages prompting me to do more, more, more on a platform that seemed to be serving me less, less, less. These creators were putting out excellent content, which helped me initially, but now I was inundated with information and overloaded with tips and ideas.

It reminded me of when I’d go surfing, and this coach I was friends with would hit me with five different tips at once: move your foot back, arms like this, paddle this way, do this thing. The information was valuable, but it was too much all at once. I’d try to balance so many different things in my head that it took me entirely out of the moment, making me surf worse than I had before.

Use Social Media How You Want To

After asking myself these questions, I realized the obvious, only rule I needed for social media: I can do whatever I want!

There are many ideas on rules, ways, and strategies for positing and performing well on social media. But at the end of the day, we don’t have to follow a single one of those “rules” if it’s not serving us. We started our businesses because we love what we do, and we love to share it with the world. Social media is a tool to help us share, not a prescription for success or a requirement for success.

So the next time you find yourself forcing yourself to post, ask yourself again:

1. Why am I posting this?
2. For whom am I posting?
3. What’s my long-term goal?
4. How can I make this more enjoyable?

Ask yourself these questions (Or don’t, because you can do whatever the heck you want!), because the answers you uncover may surprise you. 😉