In our social media driven world, it’s no surprise that as business owners, entrepreneurs, coaches or consultants we look to social media first when it comes to promoting our services, products, and business.
However, in recent years the social media universe has become increasingly noisy. With billions of people using Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter etc. daily to post content, to share, to consume news and entertainment what was once the best kept secret for organic growth is now the first stop for running ads to our landing pages and to sell, sell, sell – oftentimes to people who are not relevant to our niche.
What was once a free tool to growth-hack your way to influencer stardom has morphed into a hotchpotch of micro-content avalanches, fake news, bot-powered conversations, and intricate funnel tactics that makes it harder than ever for great content to rise to the top.
At the same time, as users of social media a lot of us feel overloaded with content, burnt out by too many notifications pinging on our phones, and increasingly anxious because we simply can’t respond to everything. And we can’t attend every event we’re invited to.
We risk losing our focus.
And we risk losing our productivity and capacity for deep, highly creative work.
It’s proven that the human attention span has decreased as a result of social media usage. It’s also known that corporate social media is designed to be addictive – it has to be, otherwise the business model would not work.
As Jaron Lanier writes in “Ten Arguments For Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now”:
“The core process that allows social media to make money and that also does the damage to society is behavior modification. Behavior modification entails methodical techniques that change behavioral patterns in animals and people. It can be used to treat addictions, but it can also be used to create them.”
Many of us feel we lack deep human connection as a result of quantity over quality when it comes to our digital lives. We lack nuance and depth of experience as a result of a noisy digital landscape brimming with attention-seekers.
What’s negatively affecting us as users of social media also challenges us as business owners as we’re promoting our brand and business on social media. When I talk to my clients, many of them express that they don’t want to amplify the noise. And they struggle to share a message that creates a deeper connection.
Read on to meet the brands and entrepreneurs who quit social media, yet they still succeed…
More About Passions, Less About Likes
Many even question the use of social media as a marketing tool altogether. And they are not alone.
In April of 2019, Lush Cosmetics UK quit social media. When they announced their well thought-out move they said that, “we are tired of fighting with algorithms, and we do not want to pay to appear in your newsfeed.” But what’s more, Lush’s decision was a reflection of their core values,
“We believe we can make more noise using all of our voices across the globe because when we do we drive change, challenge norms and create a cosmetic revolution. We want social to me more about passions and less about likes.”
Lush Cosmetics is not alone in rediscovering the value of real human interaction:
- In 2018, UK pub chain JD Wetherspoon quit social media.
- Indigenous mentoring organisation AIME left social media for good on January 17, 2019.
- In the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal Elon Musk had the official Facebook pages for his Tesla and SpaceX companies deleted.
- Author Alexandra Franzen said goodbye to social media in 2015 and has been running her business without it since.
- Veteran tech journalist, Walt Mossberg, quit Facebook and his 260k followers after 12 years.
- Paul Jarvis, author and designer, tweets occasionally but doesn’t use social media marketing otherwise. And yet, he runs a profitable business.
We Don’t Need More Surface-Level Creations
Computer science professor Cal Newport, who authored Deep Work and Digital Minimalism, has never had a social media account and argues for a lifestyle without social media.
“People tell me ‘I can’t quit social media because it’s vital to my success in the 21st-century economy.’ I say nonsense. What the market values is the ability to produce things that are rare and are valuable.” – Cal Newport
When I encourage people to evaluate their social media marketing program, I usually have them take a look at how much time they spend per week on creating social media content.
Start by tracking the time spent on
- Creating social media posts
- Posting and sharing content on your various social media platforms
- Responding to comments or messages received
- Browsing through your feed and engaging with other people’s posts, pages, and videos
Read on to discover the four questions to evaluate if social media marketing still works for you…
Think BEYOND Social Media Marketing
According to Social Media Examiner research data and a study by Vertical Response (from 2015) on average small business owners spend 6 hours or more weekly posting and commenting on social media. And that doesn’t include original content we create like articles, blog posts, videos, live streams, podcasts etc.
If a significant time as the CEO of our business is spent on social media marketing activities, then we should assume that we would see a good return of investment. As a business owner, entrepreneur or independent professional you wouldn’t want to sink time (and ad money) into a bottomless barrel, would you?
Four Questions To Evaluate If Social Media Marketing Still Works For You
I recently co-facilitated a workshop with Jane Trapman, which we called “Beyond Social Media Marketing.” We encouraged participants to ask themselves four critical questions to evaluate if social media marketing still works for them.
1. Does social media currently help you build and nurture your audience?
There is no point in growing your audience if you don’t know who your ideal follower is. And once you know who you’d like to attract to your services or products, be clear on how you want to reach and engage them.
Keep track of your growth but mostly measure engagement. People who are actively engaging in a conversation with you online will be your biggest fans and brand ambassadors.
2. Are you seeing a continuous, measurable impact as a result of your social media activities?
This goes beyond having an active and engaged audience on social media. You want to measure your social media activity input against your return or impact.
Return could be measured in incoming revenue or it could be tracked in metrics that matter to your business growth, like referrals or incoming leads – as long as you don’t measure your return in vanity metrics. Because, let’s face it, vanity metrics won’t pay your bills…
Sometimes we want to focus on impact more than monetary ROI. Let’s say you decided you’re using social media purely to increase brand awareness – then you could measure how many people @ mention you per month or how often you are being invited to be a guest on a podcast or speaker at an event.
3. Could you carry the social media connections elsewhere and have a similar or even greater relationship with your fans?
Where else could you connect with your audience to engage? Maybe you can follow in the footsteps of Lush Cosmetics and create a more intimate communications channel like a Slack channel or monthly video call on Zoom. You may want to focus more on your email marketing or explore text messaging with a service like Textedly.
4. Does working on social media activities give you energy?
While ROI and a measurable impact on your business objectives as a result of social media marketing are key, it’s also worth investigating whether social media activities stimulate you or whether they contribute to fatigue and overwhelm.
If being active on social media makes you feel exhausted and unfocused, you cannot perform at your best in other areas of your business. That’s when you want to create boundaries and make sure that even if you can’t completely quit social media, you effectively manage your time online or even outsource parts of it so that you can regain concentration and energy.
What’s Next?
I think it’s time that we acknowledge that we’re facing a social media crisis. More people admit that a digital detox is their way of managing their mental health. And as consumers become increasingly burnt out due to more and more content noise, we know that social media has reached its tipping point.
The consequence? It’s more difficult for businesses and brands to win someone’s trust when all these messages in their feed compete for people’s attention. A lack of attention eventually leads to superficial interactions and decreased engagement.
We are well on the way to losing the ability to deeply connect on social media because consumer attention is more fragmented than ever. And as marketers, we don’t help by simply adding more content to the pipeline to counteract the lack of attention.
As marketers, we should at the very least develop a more intentional plan on how we want to contribute value on social media.
If we’re not seeing any meaningful results from our social media marketing activities, it’s time to rethink our approach and look beyond social media to grow our business and engage our audience.
After all, as Cal Newport says, “Clarity about what matters provides clarity about what does not.”
Photo 1 by Prateek Katyal on Unsplash
Photo 2 by Communications Rebel
