Why your "valuable" social media content isn't landing
Here's a thing I see all the time. Someone decides they're finally going to take social media for their small business seriously, so they sit down and write a tip post. Then another tip post. Then a carousel titled "5 ways to [thing they're an expert in]." And they wait. And nothing much happens.
Then they message me, or I see them at the next networking event, and they’re a bit deflated, asking what they're doing wrong and why social media just never works for them.
Usually? Nothing is “wrong”. They're just answering a question nobody's asking anymore. And yes, I’m guilty of this.
When we say "value," we've been picturing the wrong thing
You've heard the advice. You need to post value. Give before you ask. Educate your audience so they know, like and trust you. All true, sort of. But somewhere along the way "value" got squished into one thing: teach them something. Tips, how-tos, mini-trainings, the carousel that walks them through a process step by step.
That made sense for a while. It doesn't anymore.
Think about where we actually are. We spent COVID buying every online course going. We've got more knowledge stacked up in our heads than we'll ever act on. And now, if I genuinely need to know how to do something, I type one sentence into ChatGPT and it spits out the instructions before I've finished my coffee. The queen of online courses, Amy Porterfield, pulled her Digital Course Academy after something like thirteen years. When the person who built the playbook closes the playbook, that's worth noticing.
The point isn't that education is dead. I still do tip posts. I still show you the latest Instagram update or whatever Adam from Instagram has decided to change this week. But that's not the value people are craving right now.
What people actually want is to feel something
What's pulling people in now is connection. Feeling like they're part of something. Content that makes someone go "yeah, me too" before they've consciously decided to keep watching.
That's the bit most "authentic content" advice skips right over. Everyone tells you to be authentic. Almost nobody tells you what that looks like at 8pm on a Tuesday when you've got eleven minutes and no idea what to post.
So here's what it actually looks like.
Swap "how to" for "how I"
This is the smallest change with the biggest payoff, and you can start today.
Instead of "How to plan a week of content," try "How I plan a week of content when I've got the attention span of a goldfish and two kids climbing on me." Same information. Completely different feeling. One reads like a textbook. The other reads like a voice note from a friend who happens to know what she's doing.
You're still teaching. You're just letting people see the human doing the teaching. And the human is the bit they follow you for. Nobody's choosing you over the seventeen other people who do what you do because your tips are marginally better. They're choosing you because they like you. Because you feel like a real person they'd actually want to work with.
Your weird bits are the strategy
The instinct, especially when you're nervous about posting, is to sand off all the edges. Keep it professional. Keep it general. Make it apply to everyone.
That's, uh, backwards.
The stuff you think is irrelevant, your dog howling in the background, the fact you switched the family back to DVDs, your toxic trait of opening eleven tabs and finishing none of them, the time you climbed on the animatronic T-rex at the kids' dinosaur exhibit*, that's not noise around the content. For a lot of people, that IS the content. It's the thing that makes a stranger feel like they know you. And people buy from people they feel like they know.
One of my best-performing posts ever was a photo of me holding a piece of paper that said "Canva is down (with half the internet)." That's it. No graphic, no editing, no strategy. AWS had taken out half the internet and I just went with it. People DM'd me. People laughed. A couple of weeks later I tested a really polished, properly-designed post and it sank without a trace. The scrappy one held its own. Tells you something, doesn't it.
*and by the way, all of the weird stuff I listed there - totally true for me, and I’ve totally made posts about each one.
You don't have to be polished, or pretty, or ready
I have this conversation with women constantly. So many of them want to show up for their business but they're waiting. Waiting until they lose the next five kilos. Waiting for the good hair day. The good lighting day. The makeup. Maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe, never.
I'm not conventionally beautiful. I'm no twenty-year-old influencer. And I show my face for my business every single week, because what people connect with isn't the lighting. It's the fact I'm passionate about helping people exactly like you find this whole thing a bit less terrifying. It's just social media. It does not have to be perfect. It barely has to be good. It has to be you.
So, practically, where do you start?
If you take one thing from this, make it this: stop asking "what can I teach today?" and start asking "what's something true about me or my week that my people would relate to?"
Then a few prompts to get you unstuck:
Take your most boring tip post and rewrite it as "how I" instead of "how to."
Post the messy, real-time thing you'd normally talk yourself out of. The behind-the-scenes, the thing that went sideways, the unfiltered photo.
Write down one weird specific about yourself or your business this week and build a post around it. Not because it's strategic. Because it's true, and true is what's working.
You're allowed to grow your small business by just sounding like yourself. Just sayin’.
Want help making this feel doable instead of like one more thing on the list? That's the whole reason The Club exists.
