Okay, so the lesson about showing up is hardly only applicable to social media, and I’ll probably hammer it a few times. Showing up is most of the battle for everything you do in your life. What I want to do today is to help you conquer the bulk of the struggle when it comes to social media for your company. Let’s start by talking about pull ups.
If you know me at all, you know I’m a pretty avid CrossFitter. (And if you don’t know what that is, go look it up and find a place to go try it out. Maybe you’ll be hooked like me.) But I haven’t been at it all that long, only four months. One of the key things about CrossFit is what is called “scaling” a movement. This brings the movement to a level that is still work for you, but makes it possible for you to participate in the activity while getting better at it. Pull ups are one of those things that nearly everyone has to scale when they start CrossFit; and when I started, I would jump up from a stack of weights on the floor under the bar. My calves hurt more than my arms from jumping. But, I kept showing up. In four months, my pull ups have gone from jumping, to different strengths of elastic bands, to finally, today: a real life pull up with no help.
Forgive me the sports metaphor, but there is a point: there are lots of ways to use social media. There are a billion tools, articles, e-courses, books, blogs, on and on about using social media for your business. And it is easy to get so overwhelmed by making sure you are doing Facebook “right” that you don’t even try.
What if I had come to CrossFit the first day and said “I can’t do a full pull up. Why even bother trying.”? Well I wouldn’t have done a pull up today. And if that had been my general attitude, I wouldn’t have gotten better at anything.
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google+, Pinterest, and on and on are not hard. Yes, you can be strategic, yes you can boost your engagement, yes you can get good leads. However, if you can’t afford to pay a professional to do it for you, or don’t want to, you can get better. Just show up, every day. You’ll pick things up, you can look things up. But it starts with putting your butt in the seat and getting a post up on that Facebook wall. So focus on “scaling” your approach to social media. Try to get better every day, and that starts with just showing up.
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