Resisting the Social Media Spiral

And Revisiting My Marketing Map

I feel like I have been stuck in a social media spiral for months. I add my posts and sometimes people interact but sometimes they do not. I feel like I get stuck “doom scrolling,” as the kids call it these days, and sometimes time passes without my notice and I don’t feel good about it.

Instead, I feel distracted and like I am spinning my wheels.

I feel like social media has been using me sometimes instead of me using it as a tool. Do you ever feel this way?

So I’ve decided to revisit my marketing map. Here’s why.

First, do you remember this song? This has a point, just bear with me.

Video Killed the Radio Star,¹ brings me back to 1998 and also reminds me of watching the Wedding Singer and hearing this for the first time. The Wedding Singer² is one of my favorite movies, but the song is not a favorite. It’s catchy but I like moody music better. Anyway, the words are what spoke to me then and now.

I think these words are even more meaningful today when we are blasted by social media constantly and ALL. THE. THINGS. (I was not yelling there but was emphasizing.)

What does this song mean? I think it means everything changes.

Everyone changes.

Our outlets on getting the word out about what we do changes.

Media changes.

But does it mean that we allow the change, or do we help morph the change?

I think video didn’t kill the radio star; it forced them to change.

I was recently advised that AI needs good input to help it grow and output helpful information.

Isn’t this the same for other things too like our content posting strategy? Maybe we can take back our content from these huge social media platforms.

For instance, how we post our online content, can be intentional and outside of social media. I cannot remember which person said this, either

Scott Perry

** or

Seth Werkheiser

* or both probably (feel free to let me know in the comments who said something like this, lol).

We need to stop giving our best content to social media platforms that are making a ton of money from our content to make them even richer.

Seth Werkheiser recorded an excellent short video about this.

In thinking about these concepts, I recently asked my husband, Blake, “why aren’t you on social media?”

He replied, “because it’s a nothing burger.”

Inspired by Blake Willey

Blake had a Myspace page back in 2005 or 2006 but that was it.

A few years ago, Blake commented that he thought that social media was basically face recognition software that we are all feeding our data into.

I mean yes, I figure they all have a file on us somewhere about what we look like, what we like, what we react to, etc. I do care about that a lot but most of the things I do online are public now, so I only give those sites what I want to give. I reserve private information for texting between family members and close friends.

However, I am MOST worried about the fact we give them our best content for free. We pour our hearts and souls into our work and social media spits on it with their algorithms and no one sees it or the algorithm flags our posts as spam for whatever reason.

A while back, my posts were removed repeatedly for weeks and this prompted me to create this meme.

So social media is taking our content for free and virtually no one is seeing our post. I didn’t see this clearly until hearing Scott** and Seth* talk about again here.

At about 9 minutes into this next video, Seth* says some powerful information about why he left social media and started the Social Media Escape Club.

“It's very difficult to get anyone from social media to do anything other than be on social media.”

Seth also recently wrote about the importance of building our websites up because we own those websites. We own that content. He talks about that further in this post.

You need a website, not another social media account to manage

So….this means…

I am updating my marketing map

I am taking intentional action and updating my marketing map. I am also not going to allow social media including Substack to use me, I am going to use these tools to get the word out about what I do. Here is my old marketing map:

And I am going to make some tweaks mainly to the Business for Nerds Marketing Map and I think it will look more like this.

I believe our marketing maps need to grow and change as we grow and change.

Substack will remain my main content sharing strategy but I am making our websites a priority too for sharing content as we own that digital real estate. I am knocking Facebook down to a lesser priority and YouTube will be a higher priority as we can share creative content pretty easily on there and do our live streams. I will also be using our CRM and course building systems (which includes short funnels), which are explained a bit here in my affiliate marketing blog post.

We interrupt this post to give you an alert!

This morning, someone on Facebook was imitating Meta and said one of my business pages was going to be deleted. Most of the time I ignore these messages but this time it got my attention because I was sleepy and didn’t have my guard up when I checked my phone, and my I panicked when I saw meta.something in the link section.

But the protective hazard lights in my brain went off though and thank goodness said

DON’T CLICK THAT!

Anyway, I woke up more and googled whether Facebook would reach out through messenger.

The google bots said Meta would email me typically and meta.com should be in the link. So I reported this fake account to Meta.

Back to Our Regularly Scheduled Post

Anyway, my point is, I agree with Seth and Scott that I need to take back our content. Our content is the main thing and I use these sites to share about it. These sites are no longer using me. I am using these tools to get the word out about what I do.

Your Marketing Map

• What are your thoughts about social media and sharing your content?

• Do you ever feel like social media is using you instead of you using it?

• What does your marketing map look like these days?

• What changes are you making to your own marketing map?

Please let us know if you need help by replying.

Also, I am going live tomorrow with

Elizabeth Walker

to nerd out about podcasting. Join us at 10am ET. Here’s the link:

Stay Nerdy,

Dr. Brie-Anna Willey

*This post was inspired by

Seth Werkheiser

and his publication about leaving social media.

**This was also inspired by

Scott Perry

and his excellent wisdom on his publication for solopreneur success.

1. The Presidents of the United States of America. (1997). Video killed the radio star [Song]. On Pure Frosting. Columbia Records.

2. Coraci, F. (Director). (1998). The Wedding Singer [Film]. New Line Cinema.