Top 10 Reasons You (and I?) Suck at Social Media
Ever dread opening your social media apps? There are days when I would rather delete them than scroll through their feeds. I frequently think:
What am I supposed to post today? I have nothing to say.
Well, yesterday’s post got 0 likes.
Oh great, now I have to respond to comments.
Ew, I’m grossing myself out with all this self-promotional stuff.
Do I really have to do this? Won’t people just hire me on merit?
What? I posted the same thing as that guy a few days ago and my post went nowhere!
Why do I keep doing this to myself?
I know several social media experts and they all say the same thing: Nobody wants to walk this road, and everybody needs to. It’s hard work. It’s disrespected and disliked—and a necessary evil if you’re doing business in the modern economy.
Like it or not, everyone is on social media. The good news is that you don’t have to be on every social network. The bad news is it can be frustrating even if you’re only doing one post a week.
Here’s why social media is hard, why nobody likes it, and what you can do about each pain point.
1. You don’t like feeding the echo chamber
Most of the time when I read successful posts that have been shared 10,000 times, I think, “Duh. That’s the most obvious and simple thing they could have said. What’s the point of even saying it? It’s a given.” Well, that’s the thing. Those messages are superpowered by the “Thank you, Captain Obvious” effect.
We don’t need be told “If you want predictability, work for a big company. If you want potential, work on a startup.” That’s literally word-for-word advice I’ve given to people early in their careers. Never thought of tweeting it. And this guy tweets it and it gets 200+ retweets and 1,500+ likes.
LinkedIn is all “Look at me succeed.” Just look at Best of LinkedIn account on Twitter for the nauseating evidence.
Or the “Let me use someone else’s content and add my spin on it” thing, like this guy who took someone’s viral video, embedded it in his post, and made it about recruiting.
What you can do
Don’t hate the messenger, but… you should absolutely feed the echo chamber, and only occasionally. I recommend using the echo chamber thing 10-20% of the time and then using your voice the rest of the time. Gain followers and an audience with the echo chamber effect, use your original voice to get people to know you better.
Don’t be ashamed. Everyone does it. I promise.
2. You don’t like to brag
Most of us grew up being scolded for bragging, and now the mindset is, “If you don’t brag about yourself, your career will go nowhere.”
The hard truth is that braggers win, even if they do it under the guise of “humble culture.” And they’re not even always bragging. Think of it as “bringing awareness to something you’ve done.” It’s not wrong to be proud of something you’ve done well, whether it’s a really nicely-written post-it note or a $20M portfolio you’ve sold. If you come across as genuine and relatable, people will like your post.
Bragging is important. It’s how we compete in a world of alphas and hierarchies and what have you.
Is it a brag? I don’t know!
What you can do
Learn to brag. Check out Peggy Klaus’s book, Brag! The Art of Tooting Your Own Horn Without Blowing It. You can also check out this great podcast interview with her instead. Learn to brag in a way that makes you feel good about yourself — it is possible.
Bragging is a superpower. Some people brag to you and you don’t even notice it. That’s what we should all strive for, but we sometimes have to brag obviously.
3. It’s a never-ending treadmill—and you hate the treadmill
Social media 👆👆
So you had a thought and you want to share it with the world. You thought about the best way to phrase it. You got the wording just right, you have 0 spare characters in the tweet, the image is spot on, and you posted it.
A day later, no one cares.
You’ve basically baked a cake and put it on a treadmill set to 5 mph. That’s how social media works. Posts have a short shelf life, unless you pin a tweet or a post (if the network even offers that feature).
What you can do
Don’t worry about the ephemerality of your social media posts. Use it to your advantage. Stop thinking so much about your posts. You can always retweet or re-share or re-post your effortful posts. Try A/B testing your posts. Write four or five versions of the same idea and see which one lands with your audience.
4. You don’t tailor content for each network
Oy. An image for Instagram. A video for Facebook. A hashtag for Twitter. A who-knows-what? for LinkedIn. And using the right aspect ratios for each network. It’s a lot of work!
Worse, if you just post the same thing to every network, you’ll spend an hour posting the same 10-word idea to every network. It’s great that tools like Buffer and Semrush allow you to post to multiple networks at once, but the cost of using these tools is non-native-looking posts.
What a pain!
But there's a good reason each network is different and the experience is painful. You’re trying to get the same message out to every network, but you’re not considering how each audience will digest or interact with it. A video on TikTok can blow up while the same video on YouTube is a total flop. People have different expectations for each network. They’re using that app for a reason. They like the UI, they like the other content they see, whatever.
You have to figure out how to tailor your content to the network that works best for you, your brand, and your brain.
What you can do
Find the networks that work for you. Don’t waste your own time and don’t waste your audience’s time. Make the network and the audience work for you. And use the networks you enjoy the most. You’ll be more engaged and you’ll be a better steward of your brand.
Not every persona should use every network. If your brand is “professional” and “business-y,” LinkedIn is probably the best place for you to post. It probably wouldn’t make sense to try to kill it on TikTok; that’s just not where your audience is.
Maybe your audience is visually-driven and also intellectual. In that case, stick to Instagram and maybe Twitter, or maybe LinkedIn. See where you grow the fastest. Give it a few months, post the same stuff on each until you understand what works on which networks. Then, tailor your posts.
5. You can barely keep that potted plant alive
Not everyone has a green thumb. Social media is like that special plant someone got you as a gift, but you have no idea how to take care of it. If you water it too much, it wilts. If you don’t water it every day or two, it dies. And you’re like, “What the heck? How much less/more could I have watered that plant?”
Turns out it wasn’t getting enough sun. So, your watering schedule was maybe irrelevant? Who knows.
Is this a picture of your garden?
What you can do
To keep the social media plant alive, you have to water it, give it the right amount of sun, and try to figure out how to not sacrifice your own life. For some people, it becomes a skill that’s developed over time and it becomes a natural extension of what they do every day. For others, it’s a major grind that needs to be outsourced.
Look at the brands or accounts you admire. See if you can figure out who’s posting on them. For accounts with more than 100K followers, you can be pretty dang sure some social media person (or a team) is running that account.
There’s a reason corporate offices hire crews to keep office plants alive and watered. You might need to consider that for yourself.
6. Social media marketers don’t think like you
There’s a reason social media marketers make good money: They don’t think like everyday people. Your tweet might say: “My new podcast episode features special guest Ethan Strauss.” A social media expert might tweet: “This week on the show we brought on sportswriter Ethan Strauss to explain what the hell is going on in sports journalism and business.”
See? They just have a way of putting a spin on normal, everyday things. It’s a skill. It’s an art. It’s a skart.
What you can do
There are two ways to think like a social media marketer:
Observe and learn. Think about how you would have said what they’re saying and identify the differences. Learn from those differences and try to be more like them.
Hire them.
Want that professional, hip social media flare? It might be best to just pay for the results, especially if you don’t have the time to do it yourself. My friend has an Instagram account with 68K followers. He said he had to spend four hours a day on the app to build that up. Maybe that’s worth it to you, maybe it isn’t. But remember that it’s a real skill that takes hard work and effort.
7. You don’t know what your audience wants
I’m totally guilty of this one. I’ve had accidental success with my hobby project that now has almost 17,000 YouTube subscribers. It’s overwhelming. “What could these 17,000 people want?!”
And then there’s my personal Twitter, where I’ve amassed a whopping 642 followers after, like, 14 years on the platform. What am I doing wrong?!
At least with the hobby project, I have a sense of what people want. But for my personal brand, I ain’t got a clue.
What you can do
You can literally ask people what they’d like to see from your social media accounts. If they don’t answer, find a couple of accounts you admire and reach the same kinds of people you want to reach. See what they do. Emulate until you learn to make it your own.
And don’t forget, social media is much more than posting. LinkedIn and Twitter let you see all of an account’s activities (except direct messages, of course), so you can see much more than just what the person posts.
8. You think about your posts when you’re in the app
You clicked the icon. You launched the app. And now the big, scary “What do you want to talk about?” text field is staring at you.
What the eff do you say?
You type something out. You click “Post” and think, “Eh, that probably could have been better. Whatever.”
All of the YouTube consultants I watch say the best YouTubers plan their video titles and thumbnails before they make the video. Isn’t that crazy-sounding?
The same goes for the people I know with tens of thousands (or millions) of followers. They plan their tweets. They find or make the image first. They keep a notes file with the posts and tweets. They edit it all the time, making micro-adjustments.
What you can do
Did all that planning and editing stuff sound crazy to you? It did to me a while ago. But now I get it. When you’re in the app, you should paste your posts into the app. Better yet, you should have your posts automated and scheduled.
Think before you post. Don’t do it on the fly. Plan it out and release something great instead of something you gave a few seconds of thought.
9. You post when you’re ready to post, not when your audience is online
I used to think of social media as a hobby. Then I started getting good at it and gaining followers. As you’ve seen above, there are real, meaningful tactics to using social media.
One of the things I missed was posting when my audience was online. Check out this chart YouTube now provides:
If I schedule a livestream for Monday at 1AM, not only will I be exhausted, but none of my viewers will be online. The same goes for other social networks. Yes, the feed algorithms may prioritize your posts over others, but that’s no guarantee. Some people sort their feeds chronologically.
What you can do
Post when your audience is online. My LinkedIn expert friend tells me that lots of popular LI influencers have “pods.” A pod is a small group of people who are on LinkedIn at the same time and they all post at the same time and they all like each other’s posts and they all comment and they win and I lose and my posts go nowhere and what am I doing with my life?
But really, consider having a pod. Consider posting when your audience is online. Interact with other people who are online. Increase your engagement. If someone posted 30 seconds ago, engage with it. They’re online and they are doing the same thing we all do: refresh their notifications/mentions.
10. You can’t pick an image for your posts
Images (and videos) significantly increase post engagement. But you gotta pick the right image. And it’s hard.
When we post off the cuff, we don’t have an image in mind. So, not only do we have to figure out what we’re going to write, but now we have to delay the post by several minutes to find the right image. And then there’s licensing of the images. “Can I use this image for my commercial/non-commercial purposes? Do I have to add attribution?”
After a little bit, all the stock photos start looking the same. Did you search for the right images/terms? Ugh.
What you can do
Like I mentioned earlier, you can plan your images and posts beforehand. But we’ve already talked about that.
Here’s what I use for free stock imagery:
Pexels
Morguefile
Unsplash
And if you need to modify the image (which you should because a stock photo usually isn’t super engaging), there are tons of free and low-cost apps for that. I typically work on my computer, not my cell phone. I use Pixelmator Pro or Acorn. Before I paid for those, I used Photopea.
Ellis uses Canva because she is far cooler than I am.
Social media is difficult!
Listen, the only reason I can write this article is because I’ve felt the frustrations and feel them every day. My full-time social media manager friends have shared these same frustrations with me, too.
It is hard work! Don’t undervalue it.
I have a few more reasons to share in an upcoming article (5! More! Reasons!) and I’d like to also explore why we even use social media in the first place. Hint: it can be really valuable for you and your brand.
Edify Content isn’t a social media marketing agency, but we do write social media content to support other content we develop for our clients. Get in touch with us if you’d like to learn more.
