I’m a writer at heart. I LOVE to write. It lights me up like no other and I can spend the day talking about it if anyone is willing to discuss it.

I often share how I think it’s healing… how I think it’s therapeutic…how I feel we connect to people through writing and how we can inspire people to feel things through writing (see: Does Your Writing make you Cry?).

But, being a full-time writer I also like to hermit. I go through these intense and self-reflective periods where I don’t like to be on social media or say how I’m feeling until I’m through it.

Otherwise, it would look like this:

“OMG, today I’m overwhelmed by the energy in the world and in my house.”

“Hey guys I’m happy, grateful, life is good.”

“OMG, today I’m overwhelmed by the energy in the world and in my house.”

“Hey guys I’m happy, grateful, life is good.”

“OMG, today I’m overwhelmed by the energy in the world and in my house.”

“Hey guys I’m happy, grateful, life is good.”

It wouldn’t look pretty in other words and I wouldn’t feel good sharing it.

I know that being real and authentic is important. And people like the “realness” we can show even on social media, but for me – I just want to figure my sh*t out and I don’t want to consistently do it in front of people.

I need my quiet self-retreat time.

I usually write my way through it and share it but I want to be able to edit it.

However, this makes it hard to grow an online business if I don’t show up on occasion or consistently.

The Challenge.

When I heard Deb LaFlamme on THIS podcast with Emily Aarons, I immediately connected with her and her message.

She is so passionate about social media, how to grow it but in a way that feels good for you and the audience.

She teaches how to get engagement and growth and I highly recommend her 30-day challenge if you see it come up again (you’ll see why below).

It seemed like if this person can’t help me figure out social media – no one can!

I committed.

I committed to showing up on social media for 30-days in a row. I took a picture of how many followers I had in the beginning (as is part of the challenge) and I dug deep to follow the suggested prompts, put out content every day for 30 days (or schedule it in advance to be present for 30 days), and be part of this challenge.

I can tell you that I felt inspired by Deb’s daily posts and we engaged by sharing ours with each other. I chose Facebook as my platform (the challenge has you choose one) and I engaged in the comments.

People were in engaging with my posts. I had a few comments from people I hadn’t seen before and they said they felt connected to what I was sharing, but…

The results.

My following did not grow, even with all this effort.

I felt depleted.

It took me quite a while to come up with an image for the posts each day because I feel those catch more attention than words alone.

My personal and professional writing took a back seat to this challenge.

I didn’t see how this would lead to more copywriting or editing work for me at this rate.

It was time to look at some hard truths.

My personal takeaway on being a social media influencer.

Most of the time I’m not a high energy or bubbly person. I’m passionate about writing, sure, but my way of expressing that is to write.

I LOVE to write blog posts and I LOVE to share them on Pinterest which has been a nice source of traffic for me along with organic traffic via google.

I believe my social media following didn’t grow because my heart isn’t in posting on social media every day or thinking up 30-days worth of content to schedule.

It’s like this – when my kids were much younger, I used to accidentally dress us all in the same color. We’d be at the park and I would notice we were all in blue, or red (or someone would comment how cute it was that we were all in the same color).

I finally figured out that I dressed us in the same color because I dressed in how I felt. So if I was feeling red that day, we were all in red. Yellow, same.

Social media is like that for me. I have days when I crave connection and am dying to share insight or something inspiring, and there are simply days when I don’t.

And I don’t know which day I will feel which way.

Social media influencer, I am not.

“I’m not cut out to be consistent on social media and I suck at scheduling it out in advance.”

There it is. The bottom line.

What if I can’t DO social media?

Here’s what I will say, I’m grateful for the challenge because it was the incentive and inspiration I needed to really look at how I spend my time.

Knowing that I don’t want to show up every day on social media, it inspired me to look at where I DO want to show up.

It permitted me to FINALLY accept that it isn’t for me to be “out there” all the time, though I have nothing against others that do and appreciate that they can do it.

But I also know if I’m going to have an online business, I do need to find my happy medium between all or none.

Otherwise, people can’t find you!

For me, that means spending time on Pinterest pins and posting, nurturing my email subs, and spending more time on SEO and keywords.

That way I can show up when I’m feeling it, and skip it when I’m not feeling it.

I just don’t want it to be fake for the sake of a marketing strategy.

We’ve all seen the people putting out videos and lives where they are so uncomfortable and you just feel so bad for them. If they allowed themselves to believe that there were other marketing strategies then they wouldn’t push to be live before they were ready. They could record (and rerecord) videos having fun with it until they were ready to go live.

The interesting part.

When I gave myself permission to let go of social media as a self-imposed requirement, my word-of-mouth business started growing. I believe it’s because I just focused on what I’m good at (writing!), and stopped my worry-induced-social-media-growth strategy.

To be SUPER clear – I AM a fan of social media and all it provides (I’m tentatively stepping into Instagram). But if you’re like me, you may need to write down a bunch of content and hire it out or get someone to manage yours who is great at it if it’s not your thing.

I also think being a social media influencer is awesome and I encourage doing anything you are passionate about – anything.

I’m just saying if you don’t feel connected to it, if it makes you uncomfortable, if it doesn’t feel good to you – then there are other marketing strategies and other ways to grow your business.

Having a great opt-in and good email sequence may be more valuable and more lucrative than Facebook. And something about writing emails to people who have opted into my freebie that interested them connects more to my soul as a writer – even if the emails are occasionally automated.

We’re all different and I don’t think there’s a one size fits all approach to digital marketing – but I have learned that we need to know our strengths and weakness and stop FORCING it.

Whew.

Such a freeing feeling when we just admit where we shine and where we don’t, isn’t it?

I’d love to hear from you. What areas do you force yourself to show up in your business and have you stopped to wonder if you TRULY have to? Can you hire it out or let it go???

Let me know in the comments.

XOXO,

P.S. If you are ready to grow your social media influence with Facebook or Instagram (is Twitter still a thing?) I highly recommend Deb LaFlamme – her name has the word “flame” in it for goodness sakes. I feel she is a breath of fresh air in this area and that’s how I could confidently say that this wasn’t for me right now (because I felt it was the best I could do!). Worst case, you’ll know if you are in or out when it comes to being a social media influencer.