It’s a Love / Hate thing..
When I started my small business it began its online presence on social media. A lot of the research that I was doing was hammering home about having a social media presence. I even used to discuss the importance of it in my lectures when I taught photography “you take photos, people will want to see them to show off your work and to prove that you’re not blagging!”
We all remember the blagger who couldn’t evidence anything don’t we kids? Little private joke between me and my former work kids there 😉
Well, my socials have tumbleweeds blowing across all of them (don’t even ask about my newsletters as I’ll deny it all.) It’s entirely my own fault as I have barely posted anything in months, but I just haven’t felt motivated at all.
It’s not as if I haven’t been doing things, we’ve had busy days with moving studios, taking new commissions and navigatng the school holidays which is all good stuff but it has meant that my social battery and energy levels have been at an all time low so the idea of going online after a long day and rabbiting on has made me go “yeah, that’s not happening!” I’d sooner scroll and zone out to the stuff YOU are posting!
I’ve never been a huge oversharer online (no hate if you are, do your thing! I’ll probably watch it on TikTok – send me your link!) so I mainly focus on business related posts with the odd insta story about the family / animals / Mike’s touring. But there have been times recently when I’ve started to post something and literally bored myself to death with the caption so I’ve put down my phone and moved on with my day.
Content wise I’ve had a LOT of bouquet preservations coming in to the point where I had to say no to enquiries, so I have posted a small amount of them / flower related posts but I paused the stained glass workshops over the summer as there was no way the new studio was going to be ready.
We had ambitions beyond our schedules for this move, how ridiculously naive of us.
“We are SO getting this move done in a couple of weeks in between Mike touring for the entire summer at festivals all over the UK and parts of Europe AND during school holidays where we’ll be dragging around 2 almost teenage boys who just want to chill and game with their mates. We got this!”
Yeah, that didn’t happen.
It’s been a slog and we STILL have things at the old place. That’s fine though as we’ve just signed on for a new very small space on that site so we can literally shove it all in the lift to the 3rd floor. When I say ‘we’ you know I mean Mike right? If you know me IRL you’ll definitely know this already. Good that we are on the same page.
Mike will keep all of his huge touring equipment there and he’ll have a space to do repairs etc. Our Bold St studio is smaller than where we were originally based so he’s got his own room here to work from but it’s not big enough for all the kit he’s got.
I suppose with posting that I also didn’t want to be repetitive “still moving, still working, STILL knackered!” as that’s boring too and kind of moany, even if it was an accurate representation of my life at the time ha! Sometimes I just didn’t have the energy or brain space to jazz up posts or try to be funny. I guess I like to keep my ‘exhausted mother of 4 juggles too frigging much’ moaning to my friends – they’re so lucky 😉
But I know that social media plays an important role within small businesses and I have to make an effort otherwise I look like I’m doing jack shit which isn’t the case. So I’m going to give it some ‘back to school’ effort like that energy that you have at the start of a new term in September before you’re exhausted, drinking Prosecco by the gallon and sobbing for the start half term – can you tell I used to teach?!
The start of my ‘must post more’ goal began last week when I posted a reel of me doing a bit of soldering and it’s currently on 19.1k views and has reached 4.8% of my followers and 95.2% of people that don’t follow me according to insights.
Oooh! Except I have no idea what that means.
I thought it was harder to reach new accounts and that’s what instagram ads were for but is it the other way around now? Are socials not showing your followers your content? How many questions could I have around things like this? A lot so I’ll be moving on.
Running a small business is full on, especially when Mike is touring and I’m juggling the kids and the animals solo as my working days are a lot shorter. The busier I get, the less time and energy I have for certain aspects of it and I know that I have to try to find a better balance and routine to try to fit it all in. Updating socials has been the one thing on my monstrous and ever growing to-do list that I’ve just kept putting off.
My friend Fiona, who always gives the best advice, says to look at that monstrous to-do list and tackle one thing at a time. Sounds obvious but the way my brain works it can have me looking at a list of things I have to do and wanting to reach for the duvet instead! I need someone to come along and break that down for me.
So I will be aiming to keep up to date with socials from now on, definitely utilising the scheduling features of instagram and Facebook as when I have used them for posts they’ve been simple to create and saved time. I’ve also used apps like CapCut to help me create more eye-catching content which also helped as it meant that I could use a template instead of having to start from scratch.
Hopefully I’ll look back on this blog in a few months and see a trail of lovely and engaging social media posts across my feeds..but if not, at least the intention was there 😉
