Welcome

Prior to starting my business I was a total no-show on social media. While everybody was busy curating their Facebook feed and checking up on past loves and the mean girls from high school, I flat out refused to have anything to do with it.

It was bad enough that I had to consistently (i.e. constantly) check work email on the evenings and weekends (a “must” for the company I was working at which is a whole other story) but the pull of the Book of Face and Snapchat and Instagram seemed to be an insidious beast people just couldn’t tear themselves away from.

I remember being out for after-work cocktails with a friend and her barely looking up from her phone for most of the evening.

No thanks.

I’ve always been an introvert and prefer to have a small circle of close friends that I can have deep conversations with. Not exactly the stuff that social media dreams are made of. The platforms are built to encourage rapid clicking, scrolling, and content creation that skims the surface of human interactions.

I didn’t use it and didn’t feel the slightest bit of FOMO. And then I started my business.

Adventures in Instagramland

How I ended up deciding to use Instagram for my business is very murky. I found myself on the platform and somehow fell down the rabbit hole, searching and following other coaches, etc. There was something about the design creativity in posts that seemed to attract me much more so than Facebook, TikTok, etc.

I started using Canva and loved being able to create and experiment with different fonts, colors, graphics, etc. After an 18-year career in the mortgage industry the creative license felt refreshing and nourished a part of my soul that had long been dormant. I hadn’t done anything the slightest bit artistic or creative in…literal decades.

Perhaps my love of design and newly rediscovered creativity blinded me from seeing the obvious: the actual content I love to create, isn’t Instagram friendly. It’s long, its wordy, it doesn’t involve reels of me dancing around on a photo shoot in Louboutins and talking about how I made five-figures while cleaning out my cat’s litter box.

It’s everything my deep connection craving self dislikes and nothing I value. Yet, I continue to persist. Hoping that somehow, someway, the energy I’ve invested will be reflected back to me in the form of community and clients.

And I’m starting to think I may be on fool’s errand.

Lessons in Sunk-Cost Fallacy

If you’ve never heard of sunk-cost fallacy, it’s the phenomenon where people who’ve invested a lot of time, energy, and typically money, won’t move on from a strategy that’s not working because of the amount of time, energy, and money they’ve invested in it.

We keep watching the show, dating the person, going to the same hairdresser, using the same social media strategy because we’ve invested the time and want to believe that it will pay off, if only we’re patient for just a little bit longer despite all evidence to the contrary.

There comes a point however, where we have to call a spade a spade, and I feel like that’s where I am at when it comes to my business focus on Instagram. The return on investment just isn’t there, and at this point I think it’s time to accept that it might never be there.

Algorithms Exist for A Reason

There’s a whole school of thought that if one is “energetically aligned” you’ll attract the people, the clients, the community, the audience no matter what the social media algorithm promotes. While this can happen, it’s not a strategy. At least, it’s not a good one.

Social media platforms exist to make money for their investors. Period. They aren’t here to connect us with our dream clients. They’re here to win your attention, monopolize your time, keep you scrolling, and keep them raking in the cold hard cash. Their algorithm promotes their agenda, not yours.

If you don’t want to play along with the algorithm and post the type of content the platform wants to promote, then it’s going to be a very slow growth process.

And I don’t want to play along.

It’s Not You Insta, It’s Me

How it took me over a year to conclude that my relationship with Instagram needs to be downgraded to “casual acquaintance status” makes me cringe a little. If I had done more research (heck, any research) at the beginning, I would have been able to see that what I value and what Instagram offers do not match up very well. I then could have proceeded to use it in a very different way, one that was much more casual and repurposed content from blogs and podcasts vs. being the main source of my content creation.

Live and learn.

Going Forward

As it stands, I won’t be abandoning Instagram completely, but my plans for my business are to focus almost exclusively on long form content like blog posts, podcasts, and using Pintrest as a way to share it with the world in a way that’s more aligned with my values of intention, depth, and purposeful creation.

Instagram will be a place for snip its of quick info and casual “behind the scenes” type content that I will share when I feel like it.

The pressure to be on social media as a business owner is very pervasive, but it’s not the necessity we may think it is. There are other outlets and ways to promote your business that don’t involve trending audio, posting to Stories 32 times a day, or dancing the Macarena to hook people in.

Because the people we hook in by superficial means, aren’t the people we’re really looking for.

I would love to hear your thoughts on social media, be it business or personal, so don’t be shy in the comments below.

Until next time,

Elena