How to Maximise Your Visibility without Spending All Day on Social Media

(Want to listen to this blog post instead? Check out Episode 4 of The Social Brain podcast.)

Social media is an amazing tool to help you grow your business online. It helps you to get out in front of people and to build your community.

But it can also be exhausting. You need to create content constantly, not to mention find time to engage with others and respond to the messages that end up in your inbox. And when you use social media to increase your visibility and grow your business, it’s easy to get sucked into the scroll, which can lead to you comparing yourself to others.

When it comes to seeing success on socials, the more you show up, the more likely you are to get seen by prospective customers.

But what happens when you’ve had enough of social media?

What happens when the tiredness takes over and you’ve still got to market your business?

Can you really avoid social media burnout when you’re working for yourself?

I recently spoke with my friend Rebecca Hawkes on The Social Brain Podcast to discuss how you can be visible every single day without burning out on social media. Read on to learn a tonne of new ways to market your business on the major platforms, on autopilot.

Prefer to listen to the audio version of our conversation? Go here. 

How to Overcome Visibility Fears

Before you think about your social media visibility strategy, you need to address any fears you have of being visible. Showing up to promote your business can be quite daunting, especially when you’re not confident with using your chosen platform (or platforms). 

If you’ve got visibility blocks or mind monkeys keeping you from showing up, here’s Rebecca’s advice:

“First of all, it's completely normal. So many of us have those fears but they’re something we can overcome. Tackling your fear of being visible takes practice. The more you do it, the easier it becomes. It’s also important to remember that practice makes progress. 

“Your videos aren’t going to be perfect. I fluff my lines all the time, my dog gets involved, and I forget what I'm saying mid-sentence. That's just who I am. But that’s important because people see who you really are. It helps to humanise your brand and it helps people connect with you more.

“Next, you need to get clear on why you need to become visible and understand the positive impact that it’ll have on your business. And when I say ‘positive impact’, I mean: 

• creating genuine relationships
• increasing your income
• growing your mailing list

“Lastly, look at your fear of being visible and then find an alternative fear that's greater than that fear. The fear of being visible is huge. It's very real for a lot of us. But the alternative fear that you could look for is that, if you don't show up for my business, if you’re not visible and if you’re not connecting with your community, you’re not going to have a business full stop.

“You might have to go back to a nine to five, find another way to make money that you’re really not going to enjoy. Use this new fear to your advantage to overcome the fear of being visible.”

Diversify your marketing streams to increase your visibility 

During our conversation, Rebecca shared that she’d recently changed her marketing strategy after feeling burnt out by social media. 

After being absent from her social feeds for months and still seeing list growth, an increase in website traffic and receiving client enquiries, Rebecca realised she didn’t need to be spending hours and hours of her life on social media to improve her visibility. 

Instead, she could focus her marketing efforts on longer form content that can be found via search engines. 

Here’s how to market your business without social media:

Podcasting

Podcasting is a great way to build trust with your community and connect to your audience on a more human level. Rebecca regularly uploads to her podcast The Confidence Show and shares a mixture of personal reflections and content designed to appear in the search engines. 

When you create searchable content, you’ll soon be found by your target audience. Once you’ve created and uploaded your podcast episode, the lifespan is unlimited. You can continue to drive traffic back to that podcast over and over again, meaning you don’t have to constantly be creating new stuff.

Blogging

Much like podcasting, blogging way of sharing content that allows you to create something your community is specifically searching for. 

Get asked the same question all the time? Write a high value blog post and direct your audience to it, so you don’t need to keep repeating yourself. 

Want to stand out as an expert? Write regular blog posts that help your community address common pain points. 

Want to show up in Google and other search engines so you generate more sales on autopilot? Develop an in-depth blog post with the keywords your target audience are searching for (and include links to your services).

Writing for Medium

Medium is a great place for increasing your visibility because it’s a platform with a whole new audience that you can reach. There's also the potential for you to earn an extra income as well.

You’re unlikely to make a huge income overnight, but over time, as you grow your following and publish regularly, you can earn some money there. 

Medium articles are also favoured by Google, which means they’re likely to appear higher up in search results. 

Offline Marketing

Attending networking events, going to co-working spaces, and hanging out with people in real life is a great way to connect and grow your business. Simply having a conversation with someone about what you do can increase brand awareness, boost your overall visibility, encourage more referrals and lead to more clients. 

Both myself and Rebecca have had many clients come from referrals from people we’ve met at offline events. So never discount an offline visibility strategy as well. 

Pinterest 

Pinterest is an amazing way to be visible, especially as you only need to spend 1-3 hours per month scheduling pins that’ll work in the background for you.

Pinterest can drive traffic to your website, to your lead magnets, to digital products, to your services and even to your Instagram and other social media accounts. 

Substack

There’s a new platform in town called Substack. Substack is a place to grow your newsletter and one of the best things about it is that the platform actively promotes your newsletter to other people.

So, you can be visible every day with platform promoting you, without having to actually do anything aside from writing a weekly, bi-weekly or monthly newsletter. 

Guest Expert

Tap into other people's networks by being interviewed on podcasts, doing a joint Instagram live, or hosting a workshop for someone else’s community.

When you go into somebody else's audience, there’s already a sense of trust among their followers. When you go in and you talk about the ways that you can help people, when you show up with value with no expectation for anything in return, it attracts more people to you and it helps you grow your community much quicker. 

Let's say you do a guest interview slot with someone and they have an audience of 100 people. Even if 10% of that audience comes to you, you've welcomed an extra 10 people into your community and then you can continue to get to know them there, in your own way, on your own terms. 

Do that for 10 other people and you've gained an extra 100 loyal people that trust you into your community. This can be done with one live a week or one interview a week, without having to create a tonne of social media posts. 

How many marketing streams should you incorporate into your strategy?

How many marketing streams you add into your business depends on how you work best. For some people, like Rebecca, you may want to focus on multiple streams at once so that if you lack inspiration with one platform, you can jump over to something else.

However, some people, like me, find it better to just focus on 1 or 2 streams at once. A bit like your social media marketing. You only need to focus on 1 or 2 platforms to be successful. 

It can take some trial and error so be mindful of the work you’re doing and make sure to check back in with your progress regularly. 

Longer form content typically takes longer to perform when compared to social media content, but it also has a longer lifespan. And remember, as with any visibility strategy, you need to give it at least 3 months before you can judge whether it’s working or not.

What’s the 9 grid Instagram strategy that everyone’s using?

Rebecca also shared that she’s adapted her Instagram strategy to minimise her content output but also be able to provide value and nurture her audience. At the time of our conversation, Rebecca was trying out the new 9 grid Instagram strategy. This consists of nine grid posts that are a combination of valuable tips for people, case studies as social proof, an introduction post, and a list ‘brochure’ of her services. 

The idea is that the 9 main grid posts act as a landing page or website, so anytime someone lands on her profile, they see everything they need to know about her, about her business, and about how she can help them.

To increase brand awareness and bring in new followers, Rebecca can then stick to sharing a couple of reels a week and to nurture her current audience, she could go live once or twice a week. 

Rebecca can keep the reels off her main grid but still be increasing her social media visibility and reach because, as we know, reels last a lot longer than other forms of content. 

You can still be visible in a way where you don’t have to show up every day on social media. No more spending hours and hours creating content! 

Has this inspired you to maximise your visibility elsewhere? Let me know in the comments!

Rebecca Hawkes is a Vibrant Visibility Coach who helps entrepreneurs maximise their online presence without having to spend all day every day on social media. She also supports her clients & community in creating more self-confidence so they can eliminate their visibility fears and attract more customers on autopilot.

Follow Rebecca on Instagram, listen to The Confidence Show podcast and read her blog post: 7 Ways to Be Visible Everyday without Being on Social Media.