2023 Social Media Boundaries & Resolutions With Andréa Jones

Andréa Jones  0:00  
You know, social media is designed to be addictive. So we log on and then we instantly start seeing what everyone else is doing. And then, you know, as social human beings, we try to like fit in with all of that, and just taking the time to go, is this what I want to represent? Is this one I want to show up? And do you know, is this serving me and my business? I think just, like pausing to take the time to think about that is a really, really important step, and can help us decide, you know, what is this boundary? Does this feel good? Does this not feel good?

Meg Casebolt  0:32  
You’re listening to social slowdown, a podcast for entrepreneurs and micro businesses looking for sustainable marketing strategies without being dependent on social media. Social media is a double edged sword. It’s a wonderful way to stay connected. But it also can feel like an addictive obligation. And it’s even more complex for businesses, your audience might be right there, but you’ve got to fight with algorithms to maybe be seen by them. So whether you want to abandon social media altogether, or you just want to take a month off, it’s possible to have a thriving business without being dependent on social media. This podcast is all about finding creative, sustainable ways to engage with your audience without needing to lipsync send a cold DMS, run ads or be available 24/7. Let’s get started. Hello, everyone, and welcome to the first social slowdown podcast of 2023. We are starting out this year, the same way that we started out last year, which is a conversation with the inimitable Andrea Jones from online Draya from the savvy social podcast, y’all know that I am not anti social, I am social media light. And so we’re starting out the year with Andrea to talk about how to set your boundaries and your intentions and your resolutions around social media. Whether that is you know, decreasing what you want to be doing on it or just keeping with it and making sure that you’re doing it in a way that feels safe for your mental health. So thank you, Andrea, for being here with me today.

Andréa Jones  2:03  
Thank you so much for having me on the show. I always love our conversations.

Meg Casebolt  2:07  
And usually they’re not even about work. They’re mostly about, you know, romance novels and our favorite tropes and all those good things. But we will not go we will not record that part of the conversation for today. Andrea, it’s been a year since we recorded anything, certainly not since we talked. But give me kind of an overview of your approach to social media in case people haven’t gone back and listened to episode three, and how you can do it in a way that is appropriate for your mental health.

Andréa Jones  2:37  
Yeah, you know, social media is challenging. And I think some people don’t like to admit that I’m okay with admitting that it’s complex. But it also it can be a great tool to grow our business. So we have those two competing things a lot of times. So my approach to social media is to find that balance between your own personal interests, how much of you do you want to put in your social media? And how much you want to use it as a tool to grow your business? Right? So if you’re committed to using that social media as one of those marketing channels as one of those tools? You know, how do you want to show up there? How much time do you want to spend on it? Which platforms do you want to spend time on? And get rid of all the like, shoulds? I should be doing this? I shouldn’t be doing that. That’s my approach in a nutshell.

Meg Casebolt  3:21  
Yeah. I love that. And also something that you just touched on, like, was that idea of how much of myself do I want to put into this versus how much do I want to grow my business? And I think that that’s something that’s not I don’t want to say it’s not talked about, but the split between personal and professional or personal brand versus business voice, there can sometimes be a little bit of murkiness in this. And there’s this feeling, especially among people who are learning from businesses that are more of an influencer type. That you have to air all your dirty laundry in order to be seen as genuine or authentic, or whatever our buzzwords are for the day. So let’s talk about like, how do you decide how much of your personal life you want to share?

Andréa Jones  4:11  
Yeah, I think the decision is hard because boundaries usually are created when a line is crossed. So you kind of have to sometimes have the line crossed, go, that doesn’t feel good. So I’ll give an example. I just had a kid She’s eight months old at the time of this is going to be released. And I was really conflicted about sharing her on social media. It’s pretty normal in the online business space like poster kids share their pictures, and I just see too much and I’m like, I don’t know if I want her to be on here. But I felt this this like pressure almost internal pressure to post her so I posted one photo of her when she was born. And it is still to this day my most engaged with photo And I instantly felt Oh no, I don’t want to do this, I don’t want to do this. So, for me, I’m very careful about not using her image to market my business. That’s just my personal choice. I will post one photo of your a year on Christmas, my husband, I decided, that’s what we’ll do, we’ll give an update the family Christmas photo. That’s it, that’s all y’all get. Just like sending a Christmas

Meg Casebolt  5:23  
card out to your like physical lift. Like that might be all that my aunt sees of my kids with my Christmas card, it’s them smiling facing the right direction. It’s like they just see how big they’ve gotten. But it’s not like every, you know, the daily or weekly updates that used to be very common in in social or in blogging or that kind of thing, too.

Andréa Jones  5:42  
Yeah. And you know, I’m not trying to like shame anyone for you know, if that’s their choice, if you feel comfortable with that, fine, go for it. But it’s something that I felt like was aligned for me and my business. So I just don’t use my kid her image to promote my business. And I knew that I had to cross that line to find that boundary. So you know, as a business owner, you’re sitting there thinking, man, some of these things don’t feel good to me, they don’t feel right to me, they don’t feel appropriate, then it’s time to start looking at your relationship with social media and how you want to show up and be being authentic to me as being true to that that relationship and keeping it healthy, instead of having like this toxic need to post your kids because honestly, the kids do get a lot of likes, I love liking my friends photos with kids. But you know, the place that has in the business can be different for everybody.

Meg Casebolt  6:32  
And I think also like, what is the what is the benefit of posting personal information on there? And how does it fit into what your goals are within your marketing. So, you know, for my friends who are working in the parenting space, or in the relationship space, sometimes having that picture of your kid especially, or in kind of like the productivity and time management space sometimes where you’re like, here I am at my daughter’s ballet recital, or I’m you know, volunteering at PTA today, because I have the flexibility to do that. There’s something to that if there is an underlying story behind it and the ways that your business can help other people to experience that or the ways you can be home with their kids. To use another example, I used to post in my in my business Instagram stories. If I like worked out I’d be like great. Got my workout done today. And people were like, give me a little high fives and be like way to go. But then I started to get more DMS that were like, Hey, do you need help with your accountability for working out? And I’m like, no, no, that was not what this was about. This was not about me getting hit up by cold traffic of people who are now going to try to like upsell me into their Beachbody MLM. No, that’s not what I need. I needed people to I needed that like dopamine hit. And I didn’t have a small internal group for my accountability that I know my brain needs because you know, ADHD, but I needed that feedback. And so I found a different way to get that feedback. So it’s not just kids or no kids or personal or not personal. But it’s like, sometimes there’s this expectation of I have these Insta Stories, people are watching them. Should I post about my workout? Should I post about the food I’m eating? Should I you know, like, what should I post about that makes me feel human that makes people connect with me. But then everything that you post has the opportunity to get feedback that may or may not be the feedback that you want. I think Tyler J McCollum before he retired, said like he used to spend all this time in the DMS and he’d like post pictures of his food. And then people would be like, can you send me the recipe and he’s like, just go. Like, I’m not a food blogger. I’m just sharing this because I want to share my life, you know, and there’s this sort of expectation that once you post it, it becomes public, like a public forum to discuss, which may or may not feel good.

Andréa Jones  8:49  
Yeah, yeah. And what you landed on is something that I think that we don’t take the time to observe as business owners. You know, social media is designed to be addictive. So we log on, and then we incessantly start seeing what everyone else is doing. And then, you know, as social human beings, we try to like fit in with all of that, and just taking the time to go, is this what I want to represent? Is this one I want to show up? And do you know, is this serving me and my business? I think, just, like pausing to take the time to think about that is a really, really important step, and can help us decide, you know, what is this boundary? Does this feel good? Does this not feel good? You know, is this is this representative of me in my business? Or is this just something that I need to do in a different space? And I love that you did that with your workouts, you know, finding a way to still be social, to still show up in that way, but not necessarily having it tied to your business? I think that’s super helpful.

Meg Casebolt  9:50  
For me, it was what are my identities? And which of those identities do I want to be public versus more private and it doesn’t mean In that I’m not going to talk to anybody about, you know, here’s my workout goals, or here’s what I ate. But knowing what, which of the parts of myself which of those facets are appropriate for any of my marketing, just social media, but like, there are things that I share, I’ll talk about my own mental health and my own neuro divergence. And I’ll mention that my kids are also nerdy neurodivergent. But I’m not going to be like, Oh, let me tell you about all the things I talked about with like it’s therapist this week, right? Like, there has to be a line somewhere. And that can be really hard to identify. And sometimes I think for people, it’s not even like, what’s the content that we’re putting on our marketing or in our social, but like, how much time is it taking?

Andréa Jones  10:44  
Yeah, yeah. And I actually just had this conversation with a client because I was out and about, and I forgot to take like photos and videos for social. And I was like, ah, turn, I meant to do that. And she was like, even you forget. And like, yeah, it’s because I was out living my life. And I think sometimes, the amount that we document, we don’t realize how much time it takes to like, stop and do an Insta story when you’re somewhere like that’s time, right. And so for me, I put very specific time boundaries around myself, which is why when I’m out and about actually forget, I forget my phone, I don’t know where it is, I don’t pull it out. And I used to do that all the time. Because I really want to be present when I’m present. And that means when I’m working, I am usually recording things, I recorded three tiktoks. Today, you know, I’m in my desk, it’s on my to do list. So it gets done, if I’m out and about doesn’t typically get done, because that’s not the time that I have set aside for that. So I think there’s this perception, especially with the rise of influencers that we need to be on all the time. But I can say, as someone who works behind the scenes with, you know, these high perceived figures in the online space, they’re my clients. It’s very curated. So that, you know, snapshot in front of the Christmas tree was taken a month ago. And it wasn’t taken like that morning, and they wrote the caption that morning and posted it, it was carefully curated. And so I think that, you know, keeping that in mind, you’re trying to keep up with the people who are literally planning and curating all of this, like organic and natural looking content, it can you can like burn yourself out from trying to keep up with that. And I know because we’re the ones curating it. So, you know, I think that it’s like, give yourself a break. And then you know, decide how much time you want to spend on social media. And I think time is a really good indicator, some people start with, you know, I want to post five times a week, and it’s like, well, how much time is that gonna take you do have that? If you only have an hour a week, then maybe it’s two posts, we can set a five and just be okay with that. Yeah, I’ll leave it at that.

Meg Casebolt  13:05  
Yeah, and I think one thing that you said that leapt out of me is like those people who have these giant feeds. And they are, are giant audiences. And they’re posting regularly. And having this curated plan, they have a team of people behind them, so all they have to do is snap, and then they’re done. And then someone else takes it. Whereas most of the people that we’re talking to here, most of these listeners are solo or small businesses. So you have to not only figure out what the picture is going to be, then take the picture, then right, the caption or, you know, maybe it’s not even a picture anymore, it’s probably video, which takes even longer to do. And then you have to write the caption, then you have to schedule it to the thing. And then you have to figure out how it fits into all the other things. And if it’s in a, it’s in a real or in a tick tock or in a series of stories that you then have to overlay. It’s just like they the people who are getting the biggest reach that have the teams like your team that are doing it for them. They’re not actually putting in that much time.

Andréa Jones  14:05  
Nope. No, I actually had a client one time who she would record her Instagram stories all in one day and like change her shirt, and like go in different places in her home. She was an OBGYN. So she always was showing her kids and things like that. And she took the rest of the week off. And she would just give it to our team. And we were this was Monday story. This was Tuesday story. And so like it seemed like she was on all the time throughout the week, but she wasn’t. And so I think when we start comparing ourselves to that could be very dangerous spot to feel like we have to do all of that. And we don’t, you can batch your stuff just like she did. Or you could decide that you don’t want to post in that way. And I think the decision piece is you know, giving yourself permission to do that is sometimes like that aha moment of oh, I can do that. Yes, yes, you can.

Meg Casebolt  14:56  
Totally. And I know you and I are also both big proponents of Have like evergreen content that we then turn into time sensitive content. So this conversation that you and I are having, we’re going to, you know, take the video of it, and turn it into a reel, which will be very short version of it, and then we’ll tag each other, and then we’ll share it across. And it’ll show up on social that day. But chances are if you’re listening to this podcast, or I don’t know, watching the YouTube video, if that’s what you do, because we only do an excerpt, so you miss a lot. But if that’s, if that’s when you’re listening to this is probably not the same day that we’re gonna post about it on social. And that’s okay. And so we can post or, you know, if we make a story highlight out of this, then we can post it and have people look at it all the time. And it so it doesn’t always have to be this really fast turnaround. And that’s all.

Andréa Jones  15:54  
Yeah, exactly. And one of my clients, Linda Hernandez, Linda, Taliaferro, she does this so well, where she her medium of choice is live streaming. Like if she tries to pre record, sometimes it comes out a bit stiff, but the live stream, she feels like she has an audience and she’s interacting and, and so that’s her thing. And then her team, turns it into a podcast, turns it into social posts, you know, it takes the transcription, maybe it’s a written post. And so I think this, there’s this idea that sometimes we have to always create new content. And I hope we can like demolish that idea. Because everyone’s repeating themselves. If you go to, I don’t know, Starbucks this page, you’ll see that pumpkin spice latte comes back every year, the captions are similar, if you go back over the years, they’re not read, they’re not creating anything new, they found something that works pumpkin spice latte, they’re gonna keep talking about it the same way. And so I think, you know, when we look at our businesses, we sometimes feel like, oh, we have to create something new. And it’s like, you can say the same thing, you can actually take the same post that you did last year, posted again, this year, go back two years post that again, I do that all the time with my content, my posts, my emails, my podcast episodes, I’ll refresh them and maybe have a new perspective for the new year. Around the time this is releasing, for example, I have a LinkedIn episode I do every year, it’s LinkedIn for that year. And y’all 90% of the episode is the same. I’m just repeating some of that stuff and and adding in the freshness for 2023. New perspective, right? It’s okay, give yourself permission to like, repurpose that content, this section where the magic happens with social media, because then you don’t have to think of something new, which is like a lot of brain energy on a post, it’s gonna last like two seconds, and then no one’s gonna see it anymore. You know, take something that you’ve already done and like, repurpose that. Okay.

Meg Casebolt  18:03  
Let me just take the blog post that I wrote for last year of the show notes from last year’s and just update it to say, boundaries and social media for 2023 with Andrea Jones, like, that’s what this is. It’s probably this. I don’t I didn’t go back. And listen, we’re probably saying the same things that we said episode three that we’re gonna say on episode, I don’t know, 53 Whatever it is, I mean, the world is the world is changing, but it’s not changing that quickly. But your audience is and your audience does has not seen everything that you’ve created. And there may be people that went through in binge from episode one to 50. And they’re gonna come to this gonna be like, I already heard that. But chances are, if you went listen to episode three, you forgotten most of it by the time we get to Episode 70. Right, you know, so it’s not necessarily even that we need to create something new, we probably want to just repurposed or re released that same one. But you know, I like to talk to you.

Andréa Jones  18:55  
Yeah, and I think Okay, so two things to that here. Number one, there is a confidence that happens when we repeat ourselves. Like, I think as business owners, sometimes we feel like we should be coming up with new things. But if you listen to people, like, I don’t know, Oprah, she like her. She says the same things. Like she, she repeats herself a lot. And there’s a confidence that comes from repeating yourself. And there’s things that start becoming your signature when you start to repeat yourself. It’s like that commercial jingle that you can’t get out of your head. It’s because you heard it a million times. And then the second piece of that is what you exactly said about reaching new audiences. You’re bringing fresh people in all of the time. You’re OG people, your fans, they don’t even remember what you post it. And if they did, they’re super fans, and they’re happy to see it again. Like it’s like watching your favorite TV show again, right? Even though you know what’s going to happen. And the new people that’s who it’s for and they’re like, it’s a beautiful thing to be in that spot. Build your confidence by repeating yourself and say it again for all the new people.

Meg Casebolt  19:59  
Yeah, Um, if you’re feeling like you, you aren’t sure that that’s okay. Go listen to my episode with Dr. Michelle Mazur, because she’s like, I’ve just been saying the same thing for five years. And every time I get a little bit better at saying it, and giving better, fresher examples, but like, when you have your messaging figured out, you don’t need to reinvent it all the time. And I think, I think it’s really hard to double down on saying the same thing over and over again, because we get bored with it. So we think other people will get bored with it. But take any of those big sought leader things like think about how often Mel Robbins talks about the things she talks about, or Simon Synnex has probably said, Start With Why like a gazillion times. But that’s why I know it. Right, some of those very simple ideas that can become your signature can become the thing that you’re known for. But not if you only say it once or not, if you expect everyone to catch that one, broadcast, or live stream or post, you really do have to repeat yourself a lot. And that’s what’s going to make it memorable. I think you’re totally right about that.

Andréa Jones  21:08  
Yep. And so the current stat right now is about 10% of your social media followers will see your content. And I actually think it’s a bit lower than that now, in 2023, sure, new data will come out. So if you think about that 10% of your audience is seeing your post at any given time, that means 90% of people haven’t seen it, even if they are your current followers supposed to do.

Meg Casebolt  21:34  
And when you’ve spent the time to create something on social media, also send it out to your email list, also recorded as a podcast also, like recognize that, you know, it depends on your audience whether or not they’re going to be spending a lot of time on social. And that might be the place where you meet them. Or it might not that might be the place where you’re nurturing people, but they want to get your the same information in your emails, they want to be able to see it on your YouTube channel, they want to hear you talk about it on a new podcast, right? Like it does. You can say the same things across multiple media, even within your own business, it doesn’t always have to be pitching yourself out to new places. And it might just land differently in different formats to or people might just really prefer you on video and they’re not going to read your caption. Okay, that’s okay. Say it on the video and in the caption. Yep. Yeah, exactly diverse learners. And sometimes, like, I prefer audio content over pretty much anything else. I don’t like watching videos, but I don’t, you know, we have to recognize not just what our audience’s preferences, but how to make our content more accessible by providing it in multiple formats. Oh,

Andréa Jones  22:44  
yeah, got an even like, on a smaller scale, we see this with Instagram with our clients where we’ll take a post in the feed. And we’ll put the exact same thing in the stories. And we can see different people are viewing and interacting with it. So there are some people I’m one of them, I watched stories, I rarely scrolled through the feet, to be honest, I just watched stories. So if your stories person, I put it in your stories, otherwise, I probably won’t see it in the feed. And it’s so interesting how that same piece of content can then be repurposed in other places. I’m a huge, huge fan of that. I know some people are like custom content for custom platforms, who has time for that? Nobody. And then secondly, it’s different people consuming that content, and I’m with you, I’m an audio person. So if you give it to me in a podcast, I’ll listen to way more than a YouTube video or a course or something like that.

Meg Casebolt  23:40  
And then you also said something interesting, which is like, we noticed that different people watch the feed, then watch the stories, look at your numbers, maybe this is something that you want to do to start off 2023 Or whatever year you happen to be listening to this and because it’s all gonna be the same next year. Go back and look at your I would say analytics because I’m gonna website person but go back and look at your insights and figure out what people liked. And figure out the format that they liked to, to consume your information. And we’re shutting down our feed this year, because we looked at the numbers and we’re like, well, that’s not converting. So why are we spending time writing these captions and making these images? Let’s just put it in the stories and, you know, deactivate the feed basically archive it for all intents and purposes because nobody’s like going back and scrolling my feed for what I put in there in 1997. Okay, 1982 Okay, that’s 2007 I don’t know what year

Andréa Jones  24:41  
seven a little bit early 2017. There you go.

Meg Casebolt  24:46  
I went to like write the date on something yesterday, and I was like, I don’t even know what year it is. It’s December. It’s December when we’re recording and I don’t know the gear. I have

Andréa Jones  24:58  
no meaning. Yeah, time is meaningless. It’s made up anyways. But But yeah, I mean, the insights are so interesting. And I do see, I do see a shift happening in social content this year, I just released an episode about that on my podcast, where I usually can predict quite regularly what’s going to happen. And this is the first year in nine years where I’m like, I’m actually not that sure, I can see that changes are happening, but I’m not sure how that’s going to impact us, the small business owner. And I’m so curious about what’s going to happen in the future. Because people are starting to get a little burned out on social. So however, you’re feeling about your business on social the end, consumers feeling it as well. You know, they’re tired of being sold to, they’ve sold the bad, bad goods. We’ve all bought something from a Facebook ad and been like, oh, that’s nothing like what I wanted. So we’ve all been there. We’re all collectively feeling this, and we’re all becoming more aware of that process and more discerning. So what does that mean, for the small business using social media to market? I’m not quite sure yet, I think we’re gonna have to prove even more that we’re a real human, we’re not AI, we’re not a robot. We’re not a scam artist. So that means showing up in a different way. Or doubling down on what you’re currently doing it like this this consistent, authentic, real presence. And I love that you’re shutting down your feed, and focusing on stories, because I do think that there is, there’s something there about showing up in a way that works for you, as well as your audience. And you’ve looked at the data for that. Are you doing? Grid?

Meg Casebolt  26:48  
Yeah, we’re gonna do a nine grid. So that episode after this one will be myself and my content marketing coordinator, talking about that decision and how we’re doing it and why we’re doing it. So, you know, just looking at the numbers and looking at her time that she has, I mean, I don’t I don’t even open the apps anymore. Probably like once a month, I’ll open them up and be like, Oh, shit, I have some messages here. I should do like some DMs I should look at but by that point, that was all the stories that were like, I don’t even know what’s happening on the feeds anymore. So why are we investing our time and our resources as a team into creating something that nobody’s looking at?

Andréa Jones  27:24  
Yeah, yeah. And I think there will be this shift into content that’s more easily consumable. And content that just, it has to be really resonant. I remember, you know, when I first started in this 2014, you could post just a quote, Einstein, I don’t know. And it would get shared and like, and now it’s too generic, right? It’s like, that’s okay, everyone’s doing that. So it has to be like the content to be super specific to your person who you’re talking to. And I love to use my client, Linda, as an example, because she does this. So well. She’s an executive coach, she works with black and brown women who are, you know, mid level management trying to get to C suite. So CMO, CFO, that sort of thing. And she talks a lot about this, like persona being the angry black woman. And the reason it works is because it’s so resonant, like her audience is like, oh, yeah, I think my coworkers think that about me, I’m afraid of showing up that way. And it’s that type of content that I think is really going to work, like you have to really know who you’re talking to. And then they can see themselves and go, Oh, this is the person I want to follow. Because their content really, really works for me. Yeah. And

Meg Casebolt  28:44  
in that case, it’s like, you know, if you’re trying to help people to move up while also recognizing the pitfalls of these societal expectations upon you, that’s the person that you want to work with. Because if you’re working with a white lady, she’s not going to be able to address that in a way that feels authentic. And like she’s there with you doing that.

Andréa Jones  29:04  
Because Because other executive coats, coaches, sometimes they’re like, work harder. And it’s like, that’s not that’s not the problem we’re dealing with here. You know. So I think, like, have like, knowing your people so intimately that you can speak like they feel like, are you watching me in my office? Like, that’s the level of like, that’s the level of content that we need, like that specificity?

Meg Casebolt  29:27  
Yeah. And I think also one more thing that I want to talk about before we wrap up, and I know you are much more organic in terms of the social media marketing that you do within your agency, but I want to talk about ads for just like a quick minute. What are you seeing in terms of ad costs, ad ROI and people moving towards or away from social advertising?

Andréa Jones  29:51  
It’s it’s a hot topic right now, but the ad costs have actually gone down in the past year.

Meg Casebolt  29:57  
What have because so many people were pushing back and pulling Until, until people have left the ad space. So you know, that is going to decrease the it’ll increase the supply because there’s more space for it if you decrease the demand, but okay, not, I’m not gonna get into like supply side,

Andréa Jones  30:12  
though, it’s that exactly, it’s, you know, cost spiked in 2020. With the iOS changes combined with the pandemic, everyone turned to digital marketing all at once. And now they have come back down, they’re not nowhere near where they were in like 2015, for instance. But there, it’s still one of the most practical ways to advertise your business. Like if, if you have a product that you know, sells, if you know your argument audience intimately, and you know how to target them using ADS, then you probably can get an ROI from paid advertising if if everything is priced appropriately. But it’s just like, this is like the boring side of business that no one wants to talk about. It’s just like anyone, you have to know your cost of goods sold, you have to know your average cart order, you have to know the cost per lead, like you have to know all of this data before you go in ADS. And if you don’t, you’re gonna pay to learn. So if you don’t have you know, 1000s of dollars to test it out, figure it out organically first, then you can go into ADS, if you know all of those numbers, and it’s one of the reasons why we change the price of our program is because of the cost per lead. We know how to target people with ads. We know how much it cost per lead. And it’s actually a little bit more than what our program is. So we change the price a little bit. And adjusted just like any consumer goods products would do anywhere.

Meg Casebolt  31:42  
I mean, treating treating your offer as a consumer good. And not just like, this is something especially for for service based businesses or freelancers where it’s like, well, just my time, no, that can be really hard to verify and validate. And you can say like, Well, my time is free if I get more people in, but your time is never free. So maybe that’s where we’re gonna end things. It’s like the time that you’re spending on social media to create something for someone else’s platform is not free. It is a marginal expense from something every time you say yes to one thing, you’re saying no to another. So do not say that just because you happen to be on the couch scrolling Instagram that that is free. That it’s not that your your time and your labor is valuable. Reign power is valuable. So even if you’re like, Well, I was just chilling and half watching TV and eating some popcorn and scrolling the feed and doom scrolling. Like, that’s still your brain power, that’s still your energy that’s still like, you could be using it for that. Or you could be using it for something that feels more regenerative. So just recognize that even those passive choices are still choices.

Andréa Jones  32:58  
Yes, absolutely. It’s one of the reasons why I have my notifications turned off, I was getting dragged into these apps, I just don’t want to so I’m a huge like, I love social media. So it’s, I think it may be a little bit different for me because I actually really enjoy it. But I have to give myself time because it’s like eating too much chocolate, you’ll make yourself sick, right? So it’s like I give myself my time, time to enjoy it just leave just before I make myself sick. And I really do enjoy. And I actually spent a lot of time these days scrolling on tic tac that

Meg Casebolt  33:30  
they moved from the Doom scrolling on Instagram moved over to like watching silly videos on Tiktok. And it and that’s the other thing if it makes you happy, enjoy it. But make the choice to enjoy it and figure out when that like marginal decrease happens.

Andréa Jones  33:50  
Yeah, it has to be a conscious decision. Otherwise you will get pulled in by the addictive nature of social media. It’s it’s built in.

Meg Casebolt  33:58  
Yeah, you use the term discernment earlier. So let’s end with that is like social media is like, money is like, you know, any, it’s neutral social media is neut. Okay, so maybe not, but is neutral. If the experience and the relationship that you have with it that can make it positive or negative, it is just a tool in a toolbox. So figure out how you want to use it. Be discerning about what you want to do be intentional in the way that you use it. And if it’s something that you choose to use, and it makes you happy, and it gets you clients. Awesome, but that doesn’t mean that more is better. And if you don’t want to use it, find an alternative. It doesn’t mean oh, I’m going to get off social media. So I’m going to stop marketing it means I’m going to find an alternative that feels better for me that feels more intentional that I can discern something that works. Doesn’t have to be either or it can be both and but just make sure that you have made some decisions about how you want to show up. Yes

Andréa Jones  35:00  
Beautiful, beautifully said.

Meg Casebolt  35:02  
Well, thank you so much for having this conversation with me. And I’ll see you again for you know, Episode 100 in January 2020.

Andréa Jones  35:11  
Listen, I’m here for it. Thank you so much for having me on the show. Meg, this is great.

Meg Casebolt  35:17  
Thank you so much for listening to the social slowdown podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe or come on over to social slowdown.com and sign up for our email list so you never miss an episode. We’d also love if you could write a review to help other small business owners find the show you can head over to social slowdown.com/review Or grab that link in our show notes for easy access. We’ll be back soon with more tips to help you market your business without being beholden to social media Talk to you then.

Please forgive any typos, as this transcript was automatically generated by Otter.ai.