So, I haven’t been too big into social media in the past. I’m not one of those “too cool to have a Facebook” people. I just wasn’t really posting much because it felt...awkward.
I think part of that was due to having worked in the corporate world for a short time and thinking of what would be “professional” to post. So many of us have a “safe for work” presence on social media and keeping that wall up can be exhausting so one way not to get exhausted is not to play at all.
I think I also outsourced the interactions on social media to big personalities like Gary Vee and Tim Ferriss. They are people who consciously developed large followings and are grinding on social media on a fairly consistent basis. They can carry the load, I thought.
A couple recent tweaks to my marketing approaches have led to my changing these views on social media and creating new beliefs and practices.
Doing the Work
I realized that not only was it limiting for me to “outsource” small business interactions on Twitter to the big names, but that I was missing an opportunity to document my own journey. I started to tentatively follow some people and dip my toe into conversations. Before too long someone had issued a thread challenge and I started in on that and that thread I mentioned above was one of the results of that challenge.
I’ve gotten to meet people who are at the beginning of their entrepreneurial journey and can tweet at the big dogs in social media all day long and never even get a reply, but have had long conversations with me, even leading to some franchise inquiries.
I’ve also broken through that old shell of “safe for work” Neel that was a carryover from my corporate days and really appreciate getting to be myself all the time. That’s a major benefit of owning your own business that is something more and more people appreciate (and crave!).
Finding Marketing Money
One of the business practices I implemented not too long ago was Profit First. I wrote a long Twitter thread on it here.
The TL;DR for the thread is that Profit First reconfigures your business finances so that often you can “find” money that wasn’t there before and use it to accelerate your marketing and grow that profit even more.
Implementing this for my business meant that I was willing to put aside some more money for marketing and one of the bits of advice I got when adding on that new marketing spend was to develop my presence a bit more on social media, Twitter specifically. The person I was working with knew that I loved Reddit and saw Twitter as analogous and a way for me to share my journey in a more public way and, obviously, shine a light on the MaidThis opportunity, which is how I’m getting to live this life in the first place.
That’s how the Twitter challenge I mentioned above started, and it’s going well.
Set Boundaries
That said, just showing up everyday has meant that my follower count has grown significantly and I started to watch myself become a consumer of social media, spending more time taking than giving, and that’s the last thing I needed.
I use apps and systems to share my thoughts (like threads, articles like this, podcasts, etc.) and then leave the platform. When I come back, I’ll reply and interact, but I’m careful not to get sucked down the rabbit hole, especially with Twitter where so many interesting conversations are happening all the time. You have to know when to say when, and that’s never going to happen unless you put limits on yourself.
I’m not saying you need to get on every platform. In fact, Gary Vee’s right when he points to a single “pillar” platform that everything gets spun out from. For me that’s the Remote Local podcast I host with David Lahav. We are having conversations about every aspect of the remote local lifestyle every week and that drives thoughts which come out as tweets, articles, and email newsletters. That then allows me to engage and help in a genuine way with people who are at the beginning of their journey towards freedom. But then I also have ways to limit that interaction so that I can preserve my own freedom too.
This article was written by Neel from MaidThis Franchise, a remote-local franchise opportunity for people looking to escape the rate race and reach financial freedom. Learn more here.
