So … Let’s Talk About “Just Posting Something”
Okay … picking up from where we left off.
You see that she posted a picture and you think, 'Oh, that's so cute'.
Simple. Quick. No biggee ... to you.
I wish it were that easy. Slap some syrup on a pancake and call it a day! 😄
Here is the reality of “just posting something”.
First … taking the photos. Not one photo. Not even five.
More like … take a crapload of pics, delete most of them ... because you question your lighting choices, the angles, etc. Then you take more, move things around, and then take more … and then hope maybe you have one or two pics that don't make you cringe.
Then comes the editing ... using Photoshop or whatever wicked program you pretend you know how to use ... because for whatever reason, what the pics look like on your phone/camera, look nothing like what it really looks like.
So now you’re adjusting the lighting, the angles, fixing colors, and trying to make sure that what people see online actually looks like what they’ll get in real life.
(Usually at this point you take a Peanut M&M break (well, that's what I do), because you need sugar for your brain to keep going, because you know what comes next.)
The words. 😐 The words that easily come into your thoughts at 4:00 AM. This part always sounds easier than it is, because for whatever reason, those words that were in your brain at 4 AM are now just gone, or sound really stoopid.
BUT you don’t just need a description … you need for your writing to sound natural, not boring, not too salesy, not too long, and not too short (and DoG help you if it sounds like AI wrote it).
So at this point "just write something simple" is not simple, and turns into a whole thing.
Then it's on to the stuff that people pay other people thousands of dollars to do for them:
- Creating Pinterest pins (plural… because apparently one is never enough, and no one will see your brilliant work)
- Writing captions for Instagram
- Altering all of that for Facebook
- Adding hashtags (which is still a freaking guessing game half the time)
Oh, back up ... you have to go back through everything to make sure links are pointing back to your website, so that people can actually find it.
Then you schedule it. Because timing matters. At least that's what the "experts say". 😉
And that … all of that … is for one product. One. Uno. Un. Eins.
So when you see a pin on Pinterest, or a post pop up somewhere, just know … somebody has put in a lot of time, effort, and Peanut M&Ms before that pin/post showed up on your screen.
I'm not writing about this to complain (well, maybe a little 🙃) ... I’m saying it because a lot of people have no idea what really goes into the social aspect of trying to grow a small business.
The part that takes many hours. That part happens over and over again. It's the part we all have to do to grow our small businesses in this time of social media.
In my next post I'm going to talk about what happens after you do all of that. Because that part? Well, that’s a whole different story. 😄
