This Is Woman's Work with Nicole Kalil - 116 / F*@! Social Media

Episode Date: December 15, 2022

After 6 months of showing up 5 days a week, spending hours on copy and content, investing almost $9,000 a month, I can confidently say I HATE social media. On today’s episode, I share with you why I invested my time and money heavily into social media, what did and didn’t work for me, lessons learned, and ultimately why I’ve decided to stop investing in social media growth. And before you worry about my sanity, please know that I know it’s considered one of the best ways to grow your business, make connections, build credibility, and make sales. I know it’s a business builder, possibly THE business builder in today’s day and age. And I just don’t care. I have no regrets about the last 6 months, I’m glad I took the risk, and I’m glad I know now without a shadow of the doubt that social media is just not for me. Confidence doesn’t live there. We all face decisions that feel hard, risky, and downright scary… I hope that you also choose to trust yourself. I hope you listen to your inner voice even if all the outside voices are saying something different. After all, that is what confidence is all about. Trust yourself, firmly and boldly. To learn more about what we are up to outside of this podcast, visit us at NicoleKalil.com. And if you haven’t already, please review our podcast here!

On today's episode of This Is Woman's Work, I'm going to share an update. But as is the case with many of my updates, I hope you feel the message underneath the update that I'm actually trying to share. Because frankly, I'm not really so sure any of you care that much about my day-to-day decisions that I make in my life and my business. But I do hope that listening to somebody else's decision-making process or hearing something from a different perspective

supports you as you make updates in your own life. Okay, so the backstory of this is in the beginning of the year, I wrestled with the decision to invest in and leverage social media as a way to widen my reach, connect with and impact more people. And of course, promote the launch of my book, Validation is for Parking, as well as support a couple other of my business goals. I had a full pros and cons list going. I was talking to all my coaches about it. I was doing my due diligence with people who are experiencing success on social media

platforms. I was interviewing different marketing companies, boring jaded tears, thinking out loud about it. I mean, you get the idea, right? Overthinking to a certain extent. Ultimately, I made the decision to move forward and I invested heavily to test this out. And the primary reason I did this is because I wanted to have no regrets by the end of the year. I didn't want to look back on my book launch and think, oh, I should have risked more or I should have taken that chance. Of course, I know there's always something to look back on and think shoulda, coulda, woulda, but this was one of those things that really felt clear to me that it was a risk or regret type of decision. And launching the book, putting my book out there was too big of a deal for me,

too much of a bucket list moment. There'd been too much work, time, and heart, frankly, love put into it to not take the leap and hope for the best. And now six months into showing up three to five days a week, spending hours on copy and content, investing almost $9,000 a month, listening, learning, and stepping out of my comfort zone on social media, getting so many likes and comments that people are frankly reaching out to me more to ask about increasing social media engagement than they are about how to build confidence, which is not at all where I want to be. From seeing my LinkedIn go from crickets to howler monkey and literally not being able to keep up with all the DMs, I can confidently say I am Nicole Khalil and I hate social media. Now, I have no regrets about the last six months.

I'm glad I took the risk and I'm glad I know now without a shadow of a doubt that it's just not for me. You might be thinking, well, all success requires a willingness to get uncomfortable. And I agree with you. And I understand that growth happens outside of our comfort zones and success often includes doing things that you don't really enjoy in order to ultimately be able to do the things that you love. But that's not what I'm talking about here. There's a difference between I know I want something, but it's scary, or the discomfort that comes along with learning a new skill, or the fear of failure, or the fear of rejection that often comes along when you're doing something scary, big, or worth doing. I don't hate social media because it's

uncomfortable or hard. This is about feeling uncomfortable in my own skin and doing something that I know doesn't fit me. It doesn't feel right to me, for me. I hate it because it perpetuates unrealistic expectations of perfection because it often creates a comparison game where we're left feeling less than or better than someone else. Because even after having insane growth and high engagement, it leaves me feeling mostly empty. Because I feel pressure to dance and point at words and reels, which frankly mostly hurts my eyes because I feel the pressure to share professional quality pictures of my everyday life when the reality is I mostly walk around in PJs and should not be in front of a camera. I feel the pressure to write compelling and life-changing copy in under 125 characters

and promote and sell while somehow pretending not to promote and sell because it's ultimately hard to be authentic on a platform that's designed for fake. In the last six months, I have tested out working with an amazing social media team to see if what I actually hated was not being good at social media, but that's not it. Let me share what this team helped me accomplish. I saw 260% increase in followers on LinkedIn and 142% increase in followers on Instagram. My shares on LinkedIn went up by 8,000% and my likes on Instagram went up by 3,874% with an average of 64 comments per post.

These are incredible results. At least they are for me. And the results didn't change my feelings. And this is coming from the same person who spent the previous four years trying to do everything right, follow all the best practices, take the courses, do everything I could think of to make the stupid algorithms like me, only to experience mostly frustration and very little results. We're talking seeing an increase of maybe 500 followers in a year while putting in what felt like 5,000 hours, not selling anything, feeling pressure to capture something worth posting every single day. The ROI was dismal. I hated social media then, but I thought a big part of it was because having the tendency to be a bit of a results junkie,

I thought I might enjoy it more if it felt like it was working, if I felt like I was getting those results. Now I know I just don't. It's not for me. And of course, results are all relative because having 40-ish thousand followers is not the same as having a million. And it's not like I have it all figured out,

but I was trending in the right direction. And my hatred of social media was trending and increasing right along with my engagement. Now I have learned a lot about what works. So if there's anyone listening that's thinking, yeah, but I like social media, or I really want to have success on a platform or, hey, I want the opportunity to get good at it. And then I can decide for myself whether I like it or not. I hear you and feel free to email me at Nicole at NicoleKhalil.com as I'm happy to pass forward my learnings. And before I move forward, I think it's only appropriate that I thank my social media team for their incredible work and the results. They were never the problem. In fact, I know because I still hate social media after doing it with them that I really hate social

media because they were exceptional. Paula, Kate, Berkeley, Hazel, and Jesse. If you're listening, you all are the best and worth every penny I invested. Thank you for your incredible and exceptional work. I think of you as like the Cody Rigsby of Peloton. You make something I hate so much more enjoyable. So ultimately for me, social media is too energy draining and too time wasting. And I also know it's how you grow your business, make connections, build credibility, how you make sales. I know it's a business builder, possibly the business builder in today's day and age. And I just don't care. I don't know how I'm going to build my business on the other side of this, but I trust that I'll

figure it out. It's just not how I want to live my life, run my business, or share my voice. Confidence doesn't live on social media, at least not for me. To be clear, I'm not judging anyone else on social media or who wants to be on social media, nor do I advocate what I'm doing is a smart business decision. I'm just communicating my decision. So anyone that does follow me doesn't think I've been abducted. So as of today, I'm suspending all activity related to social media growth. The algorithms can all fuck off. So what does that mean? What does that look like? Well, you won't see me on your feed anytime soon. And if I ever do post again, it will be without thinking about going viral or selling something or considering what colors perform the best or what's trending. And you can bet your ass it won't be a real. And it probably won't include any sort of professional picture of me. I'm letting go of any concerns for growth, for results, for performance.

There is no strategy, no copy, no pressure to comment back right away, and no pressure to be on every single day. Most likely what you'll see for me is 99% funny memes and stories, 50% of them using the word fuck. By the way, I love how many people will forward me a post or a meme with the word fuck in it and say, this made me think of you. It makes me giggle every single time. I love it so much. Okay. So ultimately you'll see only what I enjoy, only what I feel like doing, which is really posting funny shit and stories and sharing lots of memes with the word fuck in it.

And certainly some reshares of the awesome things that you all post. Is it scary to walk away after having built so much momentum? Am I worried that I'll lose opportunities? Could this possibly be the dumbest professional decision I've ever made? Yes, to all of the above. But it doesn't change that I know this is the right decision for me.

How do I know? My inner knowing told me. I also haven't had any regrets since I made the decision. So before I sign off for this episode and on social media, I do want to thank you for your support. I hope the content I did put out there was helpful to you or at least funny. I hope on occasion a message caught you at just the right time. And I do appreciate all the likes and the comments and the shares and the support. I'm always mindful that you all have 1 billion things on your plate. So your support in any form is a very big deal to me. If you want to stay connected, if you actually enjoy reading some of my posts and copy and what I have to say, please know that I'm redirecting all the energy I was putting towards social media toward my weekly

emails. And if I don't have anything worth sharing in a week, I won't send an email, but my goal is to send relevant, honest, and hopefully interesting and engaging content to my community, as well as more free stuff, more opportunities, and more truth. If that's of interest to you, go to NicoleKhalil.com and join my community. Okay. So let me leave you with this final thought. I hope that you also trust yourself, even when it feels scary or risky, especially when it feels scary or risky. After all, that's what confidence is all about. Trusting yourself firmly and boldly. Listening to that voice that's inside of you that says, yes, do that. Do more of that thing that lights you up from the inside. Or no, that's not meant for you. You're not meant

for that. Listening to that voice, because you know that it knows everything you really need to know. It knows your value. It knows your purpose and your worth. Even if it's been a long time since you heard your inner knowing, it's still there.

It's still speaking. I'm listening. I hope you will too, to whatever it is it's telling you. Because that is truly and deeply what it means to be doing woman's work.