My social media feed was destroying my business, this is what I did to skyrocket it.
Starting an online-based business is intimidating, it is like diving headfirst off a cliff for the first time. You don’t know how deep the water is, what the temperature of the water is, or if there are rocks at the bottom. You just take in as much information as possible and make your best judgment call and hope that you choose the right spot.
In my first two years of business, I have come to understand that you learn a lot about business by ‘being in the water’ so to speak. Despite getting as much information as possible beforehand, it’s very difficult to do business without actually being in the thick of it.
The first bit of advice I was given when I was planning my business was to look at how other similar businesses are running and figure out what could be done better. This is good advice, to an extent.
What I found very early on was that a lot of my attention was spent focussing on other people’s work and not enough on my own. This actually caused me a lot of anxiety and stress as it created this sense of falsely elevated competition that existed only in my mind. For the first three months of my business, I would find myself waking up in the morning in a state of panic. My blood pressure would be up, my anxiety would be high, and the only relief I would find would be from checking my socials.
Being predominately online, I had to see how my posts were doing, what my competitors were posting, and figure out how was I going to post something better. This was pretty much consuming my mind and dictating what I did with my days, I was fixated on what they were doing. Asides from the mental stress it was causing, my business was taking a hit. My focus was on trying to do what everyone else was doing and not what I really wanted to do, that was a big mistake.
The thing about social media nowadays is that our life is controlled by it. We spend so much time in front of our screen consuming content that the content we consume starts to dictate our emotions, our way of thinking, and our behaviours. Businesses know this and that is why Facebook Ad targeting is so effective in flooding your newsfeed with stuff you’re tempted and likely to purchase.
My mentor and I decided that I needed to take back control of my perspective. To do that we needed to craft my social media newsfeeds to serve the pure purpose of benefitting me and my business. I needed to craft what I saw every day when I looked down at my phone.
The way we did this was by using two criteria to determine if an account should be removed or not; Was the account producing scientifically accurate information that was beneficial to my business? And, did looking at the account evoke any negative emotion ie stress, anger, annoyance, etc?
If it failed either one of those, then the account was deleted or blocked. By the time I had gone through my contacts, I had cultivated a newsfeed on my socials that was built to promote a clear, concise and positive view of the world that would benefit myself and my business, and it worked.
Almost instantly I noticed a difference. No longer was I waking up in a state of panic, I was creating much better content, my thoughts were more clearly being expressed through my account and my accounts had finally started being a representation of me and my ideas and not recycled information or rebuttals of similar accounts. Finally, I was expressing The Fight Dietitian to the world in a way that was aligned with my core values and principles. This paid huge dividends.
I started getting more direct messages, I got more clients, bigger name clients, this led to more money, this led to growing the business and bringing in mentors in other areas I needed to improve on. I started growing my audience, all of a sudden, I was getting invites to be on podcasts, write guest blogs, and do interviews. I started going to events all over the world with my athletes, getting more exposure, and it kept snowballing.
All of this was a result of yes, a lot of hard work and long hours, but primarily by making the decision to focus entirely on me and my business, not on what everyone else was doing around me. By dictating what I saw every day I changed how I perceived the world, and how I felt about it.
I challenge this simple task to all of my interns, mentees and team members to see what differences they find. Every time, it is the same, it improves their productivity, perspective, and gives them a clearer direction.
It does this because you are the product of your environment, and for an online business your newsfeed is a huge part of that environment. It is at its essence, one of the biggest factors to how you perceive the world around you. There’s plenty of things in life that are outside of our control, but this is one thing you can control. And it is one thing that if you do take control of it, it will change your life for the better. Don’t believe me, then give it a try, what have you got to lose?
Jordan Sullivan Dietitian.