#118: How I Stay on Top of Social Media Without Going Crazy

Well, hey there, health coaches. How's everybody doing today? Getting a little bit of a late start this afternoon because of some technical difficulties. So excuse me for those few minutes that we are late, but we are here. We are alive. We are good. And today I want to talk about how I stay on top of social media in my own business, without going crazy, because I hear from a lot of you that you are feeling completely overwhelmed and it's normal because social media is a lot. It's a lot, even if, even if you're not running a business, how many friends do you know that are kind of overwhelming themselves just with Instagram and it's just for their personal use. So let's talk about it today. I think this really fits in to, what's been our special series, all about how to succeed in an online quarantine world, getting our business online, growing it online.

Obviously social media is part of that, whether we like it or not. So, one thing that I just want to say before we get started is I just want to position this idea of social media. Like it's not the end goal. We are not here to become like Instagram superstars. We're not here to become like the next whatever person who has 5 billion followers. Like that's not the point. We're not here just to like be all shiny on social media. The point of using social media as a health coach, running your own business is because basically we're going out to the world, trying to reach as many people as possible and then connect with them. Somehow. That's where social media comes into play. Then convert them to our mailing list. And from there, we are most likely to convert them into paying clients. Will you get a client sometimes directly from social media?

Who's never been on your mailing list. Sure. But most of the time you'll have better luck. If you think social media you know, reaching out to the wide, wide audience online, how do I get them onto my mailing list as a first step? And then how do I find my, my perfect prospective clients within that list? So I want to let you know that one great way to do that. Like there's lots of ways to do that, but one excellent way to do it is by holding free events. And we started talking about this a couple episodes, again, different online events that you can be running. One. one way that I find is really effective is to hold live webinars. And you do these for free. You do them on a topic that is going to attract the type of client that you want to work with.

Someone that you do your best work with. And I want to show you how to actually run a webinar because these can be a little bit tricky from like, Oh, what do I say? What do I call it? What kind of technology do I need? What about the lighting? All that sort of stuff. So I hear you guys ask questions about this all the time. I have put together a five day challenge to help you go through these steps and create your very own webinar. It's called grow your health coaching practice online with webinars. It starts September 12th and you can register for free at healthcoachpower.com/challenge for this five day challenge coming up very soon again, by the end, you will have your very own webinar are ready to rock and roll and something that you can then promote on social media. Right? Okay. So, we'll get to that.

Let me start by saying when I talk about social media for myself, I use Instagram as my number one, these days that has changed through the years. And I anticipate it will change some more moving forward, but for where things are at right now in the world. And for me, Instagram sort of my number one platform, Facebook being number two in the past, I went through phases where Pinterest was like, maybe Facebook was number one and Pinterest was a close number two. So it kind of depends what you're doing in your business and where you're finding those perfect prospective clients. I've noticed that I get the most interaction these days on Instagram. And that's where a lot of my clients are hanging out. A lot of prospective clients are hanging out. That's where I get the most comments and just, you know, I overall feel like people are paying attention.

So that's where I've been putting my emphasis. I'm going to encourage you to find your one, maybe two platforms that you want to focus on and then just focus there because it can be super duper overwhelming to try to do them all. Somebody asked me just yesterday about using LinkedIn. And I don't know, are any of you using LinkedIn to promote your business? I never have. That doesn't mean that it's not a good idea that it won't work. I think there are possibilities there, but that's not something I've ever put my time into. So I can't give you personal experience with that. But the point is you have to find the place where your people are, right? So, I think it's fair to say in general right now that like a slightly older crowd is hanging out more on Facebook and are less likely to be engaging actively on Instagram.

Whereas a slightly younger crowd might be more on Instagram and on the TikTok, which I don't even know about see? See? There's so many different things. You can't be on all of them. So you have to think about who am I targeting? And then where are they most likely to be online? Where are they already spending time? Cause then you're going to go position yourself in front of them. You know, it's kind of like, even if you're going to hold a workshop back in the days when we can hold in person workshops, remember those days, same thing. Where's my target market hanging out. Okay, I'm going to go put myself in front of that audience. I'm going to go hold a workshop there. I'm going to go connect myself with the place that my people are already going to. So, it's exact same ideas, just doing it in the online world.

Say I'm saying Instagram is hard because I post links. Okay. I have a great solution for that. If I, if I forget ping me in just a minute and I will talk about how you get around that, it's an easy fix. So I just want to let you know that that's what you need to do first. Don't try to overwhelm, overwhelm yourself and do everything at once. I have complete... I'm almost like given... I've really kind of given up on Pinterest at this point, even though I was very hot on it, like a couple of years ago, right? So you kind of just see where your business is going, choose a platform. Cool. That's where you're going to hang out. Now, if you're like brand new to the platform, that's another thing you're going to have to learn the ropes. So, you got to get in there and you got to start posting stuff and you got to start interacting with people.

The only way to learn these things is to do them. And you can have a lot of freedom with that in the beginning because you probably don't have that many people following you. If anyone, when you first start. So who cares? What you post nobody's even seeing it. You know what I mean? You can feel very free to just kind of do whatever in the beginning. And like it let's say on Instagram, you're going to learn like, Oh, what's this thing with hashtags. What are people doing there? Oh, what are these stories that people are posting? And you can kind of find your way organically. You do not have to wait until you are an expert in order to begin using these tools, just go into it with a beginner's mind and you will learn and you will start showing up smarter and better and more effective every day.

So for me personally, I've been in business for 11 years now. And I have, at times tried to outsource my social media stuff. It has never worked like it has never worked for me. It just doesn't make sense to me because when I'm out in public and that includes on social media, I want to be there representing myself. Well, I want to be there as me. I don't want something that somebody else wrote. I don't want something that was like done for you. That I'm going to like swipe and use as my own. Like, I think it's effective when you show up as you and I have not fully figured out how to outsource that yet, because only I am me. So in case any of you are wondering, I do all my own social media. I have two Instagram accounts and it can be a lot, like it can be a little bit overwhelming. Maridella is saying, I feel it takes a lot of time to put my content calendar together and then create the marketing stuff, the pictures, the stories I could spend the whole day doing just that and never get to anything that drives profit.

Yes. That's the exact problem. It's so easy to get sucked in. So, one way that I've made it easier on myself is first of all, knowing what my main platform is when I post to Instagram, then you know, you have an option to share it to Facebook. So I do that. So I'm not creating separate content for Facebook. I do not have the time for that. So that's, that's how I have prioritize my people on Instagram. And then I kind of see which posts performed the best. And then I will share those to Facebook. If it's performed, you know, if it doesn't get that many likes, it's like, eh, I don't even bother sharing it to Facebook. Just the best ones. So when this way, I'm really only doing one thing instead of two things. I like that. The other thing that has been a game changer for me is going to grab my phone right here.

I collect stuff all the time on my phone. So if I'm out with my kids, I'm taking pictures. If we're eating something, I'll probably take a picture of that. If we are at the park, if I'm out with my family, if I'm out with friends, like I'm always collecting content. I don't know what I'm going to do with it yet half the time, but I'm taking videos, I'm taking pictures. And it just kind of sits on my camera that way. Or even when I'm home, you guys, not just when I'm out. Cause Lord knows. We have been home a lot in the past six months, but same thing, taking a picture of what I'm eating, taking a picture of something that I'm doing around the house, whatever. And I save it. So, I have an archive that way when I'm like, okay, I got to post something up to my feet.

I haven't posted anything in a day or two. I just kind of go into my archive and I find a picture that's already there. It's so much faster than going, Oh gosh, what do I have to post about? All right, now I've got to take that picture. Well, I don't have any food in the house. So I can't take a picture of that. I'm in my pajamas. That's not, I can't even take a selfie. Look at my hair. You know, it's easier if you just already have a bunch of stuff, preloaded, and then you can choose from it, right. Something to go along with it. Boom. You're done love that approach. It works really well if you're doing like Instagram stories too. I used to try to do them in real time. Like, let's say I'm making a meal and I'm trying to like make the meal, but also shoot it for Instagram at the same time and post it, but the hashtags and do all the things.

And that was like crazy. Cause then the meal takes like two hours. So instead I just shoot the video as I'm doing something that I think might be interesting in the future. Save it. And then later I go through later, I edit it later. I kind of pull out what I think I need what I think I can turn into a decent post. So that is one thing that I want to put out there for you. For sure. The other thing is that I find in terms of planning, what goes on social media guys, you can totally do this. I'm not saying you shouldn't, you can try. I have tried. I have tried to be like, okay, on Monday, I'm going to post this. And then I have this event coming up. So, two days before that I'm going to actually have like a calendar mapped out.

I can't like, I can't even, I cannot even do that. I find if flows out of me much more easily, if I let my social media actually just reflect what I'm doing in my life, shocking, right? Like there's no, that's not, that's not really strategic. But if you think about it, it kind of works. Because if I have an event coming up in a couple of days, it's likely I'm doing something that is related to that event in the previous days. So we'll probably post something and I can talk about the event. Like it's just organic. It just works. Right? If it's the middle of summer and I want to be posted, let's say it's summertime. And you want to be posting a lot of like summertime dishes onto your Instagram feed or onto Facebook or whatever it is. Then just take pictures of what you're eating, what you're already making.

You don't have to do anything special. So I find that like my life, if you're walking your talk as a health coach, your life is going to reflect a lot of what you want to share and teach. So you don't have to come up with like this whole separate calendar and this whole separate plan. You're just going to like live your life. You're going to buy the products you normally buy, make the food. You normally make exercise the way you normally exercise. And if you're kind of collecting videos and photos along the way, you will have everything you need when you need it. And that has been very helpful for me to just think of my business as an extension of my life. Now there's obviously some editing that goes on, you know, I'm not going to post a picture of like someone. I went on a date with last week, you know, we're going to like edit out certain things.

I might just use the picture of me, not the picture of us together because that's like not the kind of content that I'm wanting to put out on my social media feed. Right? So it's not like anything I take a picture of makes it, but you can kind of curate your social media posts by just going through your everyday life. That is a big tip for you. What else do I want to share? Well, I know when I brought up this topic yesterday, actually somebody commented that she thought it was so much work to take that perfect photo. You know that like scroll, stopping photo that people are actually going to stop and look at, listen, I don't know about you, but I'm not a photographer by trade. I'm not a photographer. I'm definitely not a food photographer. So, I thought immediately of two ways that I kind of get around that one is like, take the best picture.

You can. It shouldn't take you more than a couple of seconds. Right? Like my kids know a lot of times before I put dinner on the table, I take the plate. I carry outside. I put it on the deck because you're always going to get better lighting when you're outside and I'll take a picture or two or maybe three. And then I come back inside and we eat. And if I forget to do that, they'll be like, mom, aren't you going to take a picture? It's too funny. So it doesn't take me a lot of time, but where you can then do, once you bring your picture. And again, I'm talking about Instagram specifically, but you know, there's a million different tools. You can be doing this on, you take like a mediocre picture and then you can crop it. You can lighten it; you can brighten it.

You can take out the shadows, like you can play with all the editing tools. And I feel like that really helps our kind of myth picture get a lot better. So that's one thing, editing, editing, editing, very easy to do right within the app, if you're an Instagram. Anyway. And then the other thing that I do is I'm not always posting pictures. So I told you about how I collect photos and videos from my everyday life. The other thing that I do is I collect ideas. So if I'm like on a website and I see, I don't know, a tee-shirt that has something funny on it or whatever, a quote or I come across, like literally anything that I think would be interesting for my audience. I just screenshot it. So, if you go through my camera roll, you'll see all these screenshots of different things that I have collected from the web.

Now, if I was really smart, I'd be like, keep them all in a special folder together. I don't do that. It's just all in my camera roll, but it's in chronological order. So I'll be like, where's, where's that thing? Where's that? Oh, there it is. You know, and then what I'll do is I'll either use it just as is crop it, you know, post it that way, maybe to my stories or I'll use it for inspiration or I'll use that quote and to create a graphic. And I do that right on my phone too. So I don't know if you guys have used Canva. It's a tool that I use. I have used on my desktop. You can use it. It's called canva.com. Just raise your hand or tell me in the comments, if that's a tool that you've used so far, it's phenomenal for making a PDFs.

We're making all kinds of graphics. Well, they have an app on the phone. And so what I do on my phone, I find my camera roll. I find that the quote or whatever that I want to be using, and then I just go into Canva and I have a template set up. I have one for my she's got power account, which is my health coaching Instagram account. And then I have another, for my health coach, power community, Instagram account, they have different colors, but it's like the same basic template. And I just go into the template. It's very simple once, just some texts with like a green outline and it has my handle at the bottom. So that part stays the same. It says like right here, health coach, power community at the bottom, and I'll just highlight the quote type in something new hit done, and then export it to my camera roll.

Right. So I'm not sitting around. I used to sit around, Oh God, but something really smart that I can post to Instagram. Oh, I've got to think. I'm not feeling really inspired right now. Inspiration never hits when you need it. Right. So collect things when you're feeling inspired. Oh, you can write things down in the notes on your camera. You know, if you're just thinking about something sometimes a quote or something that a client has said during a meeting, like I will say, Oh, that's something that's like, great. That was such a great point. Like I want to make that point. I'm going to talk more about that. Write that down in a note, you know, collect all this stuff. So when you need it, it's there. That's my point. And then you can turn it into a graphic. I got to tell you guys like my quotes, my graphics versus my pictures.

Like the graphics with words that I do on Instagram tend to be my higher performing posts overall. Cause you can, you know, there's a way that you can look at your insights. If you have a business account, which you should have, and then you can see like which post got the most likes, the most shares, the most saves the most comments, all that kind of thing. And last year I remember I did that at the end of the year, looked at the whole year's worth of posts and the ones that got the most engagement were the quotes. So it wasn't even the pictures. So if you're worried about taking great pictures, you don't even have to. I kind of, I do mine half and half, half photos, half graphics with words on them. Melanie says that Canva makes her, or that she's something that you're doing.

Melanie makes your photos look amazing. And then, Oh yes, I wanted to talk about the links. So which Samantha asked about earlier. So with Instagram in particular, yes, on Facebook, you can always throw a link into your post and that's so easy and wonderful. But on Instagram, if you don't know what we're talking about within a post, you can't have a link. I mean, you can, you can put a link, but it's not something that people can click on and that's super annoying. So, so one thing that you can do, I do this as if I have a link, it's what you call like a pretty link. So for example, if you want to join my free five day challenge, starting on September 12th, about how to create a webinar, you would go to health coach power.com/challenge. I'll write that in here because it's so simple, but so maybe someone just looks at it and then they go and type it in somewhere maybe.

But the other thing that you can do is I always write clickable link in bio. If you go to your Instagram bio, you get one link. And one link only up there in the bio area. And I use a tool called link tree. There are others. There's other ways to do this. I find link tree to be very easy to use. So it right here, it says free five day challenge starts September 12th. And if you clicked on that link, it actually takes you to a page where there are many links, different things that I've mentioned. So anything that you mentioned on Instagram, you can very quickly throw a link up to your link tree and then it holds them all here and you can reorder them. So whatever's most important. You can kind of put at the top, which for me right now is free.

Learn to grow your practice online with webinars and does five days. And then that button just becomes a link that takes people wherever you want them to go. If you're talking, let's say you're talking about a product or a recipe or something like that. And you want to say, you know, you can get the recipe at my blog or whatever. Say the link is in my bio and then they go to your bio and they'll be able to find it there. So that's kind of the workaround for Instagram. And there's even a way, you know, if you pay for link tree, you can actually look at your data or your analytics and see how many people are clicking. What are they clicking on? All sorts of stuff like that. So it's a super useful tool. But I think the biggest point that I wanted to make is that you can repurpose things from your life.

You can collect and have an archive to pull from when you need it. And then you can repurpose from one social media platform to another. If you do everything in a square, it's good. I find that that works across platforms much better than if you're working with different size images. Melanie said, I'm literally on Canva right now. And I have been for seven hours today. It makes everything gorgeous. Yeah. We love Canva. Canva is an excellent tool. I tend to use Photoshop for a lot of my work because I am a trained graphic designer. Have you spoke to shop for about 20 years now, but Photoshop is expensive and it's hard to learn. It's not something that anybody needs to do. Canberra really does the job very well. And once I put it on a phone, I have to say it makes social media so much easier.

Okay. Before we end today, I want to say one more thing about managing your social media. And it is this, as soon as you start getting trolled, do you know what I mean by that? You're getting people leaving nasty comments on your posts. That's when you know you've made it. I swear that was it. It was so hard for me in the beginning when people would kind of come at me in my social posts, my comments and they would say mean things and it would hurt my feelings. And I'm like, Oh my gosh, what do I do? Should I? And I'd write back to them and we'd get into this whole thing, ladies and gentlemen protect your energy. So if someone comes to your social media page, whatever platform you're on and they are being rude to you, obnoxious, disrespectful, saying things that are hurtful to you or to other people, listen, it's like they came to your party and you can kick them out.

And I will block kick out, delete without a second thought if for no other reason than to protect my energy. Because as a sort of, I'm not going to say like public figure. Cause I think that might be overstating it, but as someone who's putting themselves out there, like you need always to protect yourself energetically. So that's what those block buttons are for. Don't be afraid to use them. Don't be afraid to delete comments. And it's not because you're not. People will say, Oh, you can't even have a conversation about this. Or, Oh, you're not willing to see anyone's point other than your own. I mean, God forbid you bring up a controversial topic, bring up the controversial topics. Talk about what you want to talk about. Engage in meaningful conversation. But when it becomes obnoxious, abusive, inappropriate delete, and block block, block, block, block, and you will be a happier person and better able to manage your social media.

Moving forward. Samantha wrote something here, which is something else that happens a lot. The comments like you're pretty, or you get, you know, I don't know what happened over quarantine. Suddenly all these men will follow me on Instagram. They seem like real people too. I don't know. It's weird. I don't even know where they find my account and you get the direct messages from them and things like that. Delete, delete, delete, block, block, block. Anything that bothers you. You do not have to be available to any of that. Ever. Melanie says, I have a current troll who told me my team program will cause eating disorders, right? So what are you going to do? 10 years ago, I probably would have answered that person. I would have debated that person I would have tried to get today. Hmm, no, thank you. Delete, delete.

This is my house. You're in my house right now. My rules don't disrespect me in my house. There you go. You guys, those are my tips for managing social media without losing your damn mind. Remember if you want to learn how to put together a webinar, capture all these leads from social media and get them on your mailing list. Join me for my free five day challenge. You can sign-up for help, sign up for it at healthcoachpower.com/challenge. And last but not least, I want to say thank you to Kelly who left this five star review on iTunes. She wrote, I am so grateful that I found Michelle and her podcast. I've had so much fun. Binge listening to her incredibly helpful episodes. They're full of value. She offers real world practical advice and tips. I've gained so much clarity about my business and how I can help my clients.

All health and wellness coaches of any type will benefit tremendously from this podcast. It's knowledge. We all need. Michelle gives it to you straight. She answers questions directly and pragmatically. She clears up confusion and she's fun and relatable. Thanks girl. You know what Kelly, if you're listening, please send your mailing address to support at healthcoachpower.com and reference episode number 118. We have a little present to send your way as a thank you. And for everybody listening, I love reading your reviews. It helps for you to leave a written review for the show on iTunes, because then we're able to reach more coaches, which enables me to continue bringing you free content week after week after week. So thank you so much in advance and I will be back next week with a little bit more on succeeding in an online quarantine world until then take care of everybody. I'll see you soon.