Tales From the Online Marketing Crypt 10 – Play the Dangerous Social Media Comparison Game

The truth behind the social media gurus who don’t want you to know

I’m sure we all have. We compare ourselves to seemingly successful people who display their achievements on social media.

But… it sure can be a dangerous slippery slope…

You start to question yourself.

I wonder if you’re doing the right thing.

Second, second guessing your business and marketing strategies and thinking that the grass is definitely greener on the other side of the fence.

Then the snowball builds up and starts to affect how you appear in your business.

You’d rather be doing chores than facing your to-do list.

You lose your enthusiasm for building a business at all.

You start to think of yourself as a failure. It is not worthy of success. Something must be wrong with you. Why even bother?

All because you compared yourself to the fairy tale poster children of social media success.

The truth is that every business owner has their trials and tribulations.

Everyone fights in one way or another.

They just don’t let you see the darker side of running a business.

They want you to see nothing but their successes, so your impression of them will always be favorable.

Heck, I certainly don’t air my dirty laundry! And it’s not because I want to hide any truth from you, or be genuinely transparent, it’s because it’s really not newsworthy.

It is not newsworthy because it is common.

Building a business has its ups and downs.

We all have challenging clients who do not pay their bills for services provided or products received.

We all have problems with people who don’t show up for scheduled appointments and ghost us afterwards.

We all struggle with recruiting new team members, struggling to find the perfect balance between skill, enthusiasm, and being aligned with our values.

And yes, I often ask myself, especially in the hiring department: Am I asking the right questions? Am I digging deep enough that I can foreshadow what’s to come if I hire this person? Am I paying enough to keep them motivated to stay? Am I communicating in a way that inspires them to want to do an exceptional job with each assigned task? The list goes on.

But I don’t air these questions on social media. It’s just not something I want to bring up and get hundreds of opinions from people who know nothing about our business model and situation.

However, I have consulted HR professionals because this is their area of ​​expertise!

My point in all of this is to warn you not to compare yourself to others on social media.

You will never get the full story of what they are going through just by reading their posts. Even those who say they are being totally transparent? Trust me, they’re not sharing everything.

At the end of the day, all business owners are trying to operate a business and make enough profit to be sustainable. They’re not going to air their dirty laundry for everyone to judge.

In fact, there are some “gurus” who are downright misleading in what they reveal on social media. I know because some of them have hired us to work with them. And it wasn’t nice.

They present the false face of being rich, living the high life, running a successful business that allows them to travel frequently, and enjoying the epitome of what an entrepreneur aspires to be.

But that is not what is really happening.

From my experience of working with such gurus:

  • They always want to pay less than my going rate, citing that it should be a privilege to work with them and the exposure alone will get me more clients. No.
  • They rarely pay their bills on time.. Some do not pay for months. Some end up filing for bankruptcy and pay nothing.
  • They often operate on a “launch” business model where it’s feast or famine. They spend a lot of money launching a new product or program and rely on its success to pay off the pile of bills.
  • If it was successful, they happily pay and feel good about their generosity. If the launch didn’t deliver the desired results, then they won’t pay their bills and blame everything and everyone but themselves for it.

And throughout it all, they brag on social media about their latest achievement and offer “wise” advice on how to run a successful business.

Now, not everyone is as sinister as what I just described. There are others who seem to have amazing and successful businesses and most likely do!

But comparing yourself to them is also an exercise in futility because:

  • They are not revealing all the hard work it took to get to this point of success. They can’t do this, or it would be a full time job just reporting!

  • They have spent countless hours working hard long before they could say their business was successful. It didn’t happen overnight for them nor should you think it should happen for you.

  • They have a team that supports them. Whether it’s a trusted advisor, employees, and other resources in specific areas of expertise, they’re not building a successful business on their own. I guarantee it.

So please be warned, before you start comparing your business to someone else’s, keep in mind that you don’t know the whole story. He doesn’t know about the trials and tribulations they’ve been through, the lawsuits they could face, the threat of bankruptcy gripping them, or anything else they choose not to reveal on social media.

But what you can do is:

  • Being in competition with yourself. This is how I’ve always operated. Every day I ask myself how can I be more efficient? What can I do to attract more of our ideal clients? How can I serve my team so that they feel valued? What do I need to do today to ensure all bills are paid? (Remember I’m the overachiever badge winner it’s in my DNA to be competitive and the best competitor is myself).
  • Have a plan. Running a business without doing your due diligence and planning first is like building on a foundation of quicksand. Make sure your business vision is viable by having a business and marketing plan that shows your vision is also profitable.
  • Spend wisely. It’s overwhelming how many options there are today when it comes to setting up your trading systems. There are dozens of newsletter service providers, hundreds of social media management systems, thousands of web hosts, and so on. Before you jump into what seems like an incredible offer, ask someone who knows that space first for qualified information based on your individual needs.
  • Don’t try to do it alone. You’ll be setting yourself up for disappointment if you do. The more you try to do things that are outside of your area of ​​expertise, the longer and more expensive it will take to reach your business goals.
  • And if you’re thinking of spending some money now to learn what you need to know, that’s a perfect example of what I’m talking about. (By the way, it’s often these gurus who sell these programs on how to build a successful business that I referred to earlier.)

There is a lot of hard work that goes into running a business. And the last thing you need is to become disenchanted with all the positive posts and great images you see on social media.

Sure, use it as inspiration for yourself if that’s what you want to achieve, but keep in mind that there is always more lurking behind the curtain that will never be revealed. Wizard of Oz fans?

For the success of your business,

Suzanne

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