If you’re new to The Makery Company, then let us just tell you this. We never started out as a social media marketing agency or planned to provide social media management as a service. So when asked about the stressors of creating content not only for your own business, but for your clients as well.. We had a lot to say.

It would be safe to say that we went through all of the same range of emotions you are experiencing right now or have experienced. We personally felt that we experienced these emotions at a rate faster than advised due to our own poor decision making..

This article might also have been called: Your 3 Step Recovering from Social Media Anxiety

Step 1: Your Social Media Output Should be Limited by Your Systems or Processes

There is a lot tied up in ‘Step 1’, but let’s just say that having boundaries is a good thing.

What’s hard about running your own business, being in charge of another business’s marketing, or just social media in general, is that there seems to be no end to it. There’s almost no safe space for you brain to relax unless you:

a) Just forget about social media all together (temporary fix at best).

b) You create boundaries for yourself, your clients, and your business (and respect them).

Due to the fact that we didn’t set any boundaries we didn’t know what amount of time it was going to take in order to meet our client’s expectations. Our task, set to us by our first client was this; “We want to post a reel a day.” They had been doing this on their own for just over a month and were ready to hand it off. We of course said yes, and we quickly found ourselves in a position that was very labor intensive.

We didn’t start off with the thought, “Is this sustainable…?” We, meaning The Makery Company, knew that trending audios were going to get them the best results. Knowing that, we made every single reel a trending audio. The struggle from there was how to do we relate this somewhat unrelated skit or lip sync back to their business to generate leads?

To clarify. We would find the audio tracks we wanted to use, come up with the creative concept for the reel, source any needed props, direct it, film it, edit, choose a decent thumbnail, write the copy and post it.

This was a full time job, not sustainable for our business and definitely too much time to spend on one client.

Thus, after about 3 month of this we had a talk with our client. We developed the concept that we would start creating more diverse content that could be repurposed or saved for later.

After implementing this we were able to take the time we spent on this client’s deliverables and cut them down by half or more!

As we still work with this client now we can tell you that we made another iteration to our content approach and instead of making 30 reels a month we now create [ 4 YouTube Videos, 30 Instagram Reels, 30 YouTube Shorts, 1 Blog Post, and of course photos ] in the same amount of time.

Step 2: Measure Metrics Outside of Social Media

If all you’re focusing on is social media growth, you can very easily lose sight of the fact that it’s a tool to help build and grow your business.

You may have heard the saying, “What you focus on expands.”

As a business owner we like to pick problems or projects and do deep dives on them. Becoming hyper focused for a short period of time is our way of making up for the fact that we haven’t consistently reviewed and attended to this ‘need’ we have in our business.

If our sole focus is improving out social media then we really need to start taking into consideration it’s effect beyond our profile stats and here’s why.

Due to the nature of marketers and business owners, we already have a hard enough time managing what’s on our plate. Adding something to our plate that doesn’t seem to be real work or have any immediate effect to our business seems to be a waste of time. So when it comes to reviewing your business’s metrics outside of social media your brain may start to fall apart. Maybe you don’t know where to pull these metrics, you haven’t set them up yet, or there is just a mounting frustration because you don’t know how content is going to improve them.

The good news is, that despite your initial reluctance to dive into these, they will be your saving grace to your anxiety when you start producing content for social media. As a social media marketing agency we use to get stress out about all of this:

• Not having a large social media following
• Not getting tons of engagement on our posts
• Not being able to devote more time to growing organically
• Showing up consistently but not seeing any results

All of this was until we started reviewing our business’s analytics consistently.

We started looking at the big picture and analyzing our growth in multiple areas. What we found is that social media had been helping us grow this whole time. It jus so happens that some of our potential clients chose not to engage with us on social and jumped straight into our email list or booked a consult call. Another correlation we saw was that every time that we showed up in Instagram stories before 10am each day, our website traffic would 10x.

Knowing that our email list was growing, our website traffic was increasing, and we were producing content that would feed other areas of our business, we started to chill out.

Growth was taking place, we were getting results, but that just weren’t appearing like we had hoped. Now the approach to social media become more strategic and less of a chaotic scramble.

Step 3: How You Produce Social Media Content Needs to Change

The story is the same for millions of business owners and marketers all over. You go hard on producing content, business or life distracts you (for worse or for better), you let is slide for a bit because nothing seems to be breaking, then you hit panic mode and it’s back to the hard content grind.

It’s the approach to how you make content that needs to change. For every single one of our clients, we have a ‘content goal’ in mind as we start exploring how we are going to meet it. In large, this has to do with the amount of time that our client can devote to producing content with us. Additionally, we have learned that taking the time to map out how this content will grow the business in other areas mentally allowed them to fully commit to the content.

In the back of your mind you may be second guessing if this is going to work. The reason you’re questioning it is because you haven’t structured your content to fulfill more than just one need. As you look at content differently you begin to see the benefit it has in your own business beyond the ‘potential’ upsides that are sold to us through social media metrics.

Start producing content that scratches your own itch!

Every business needs the following:

• Answers to frequently asked questions
• Reviews and Testimonials
• Relatability to those with the same struggles
• Insights into avenues that could help solve a problem
• Encouragement to take action
• Resources for them to consider and trust you
• Clear lines of communication and steps to engage

All of these areas of content can start building your content empire:

SEO: Blog Posts

FAQ: Website Content

Testimonials: Website Content/Search Engine Rankings

Education: Email Sequences to Nurture Leads

Encouragement: Special Offers

Communication: Forms/CRMs/Automation/Calls to Action

There is so much that content can be doing for your business before you ever should be losing sleep over your social media metrics. Our goal is to help you see the benefits to your own content, because once you start resonating with it so will everyone else.

As we step off of our soapbox, our goal is to help you change the way you business makes content. Everyone is limited in one area or another that keeps them from doing ‘something’. Lean into your strengths and use systems and automation to make up for the time you don’t have.

If you like to talk more about the specifics of your business: Schedule a call