Welcome to Female Owned, the podcast for small business without the hustle, without the hacks, without the overwhelm. My name is Astrid Bracke and I’m a small business mentor working with small business owners, freelancers and creatives just like you to create slower, gentler and more profitable businesses.

Whenever I tell people that I don’t market on social media, they tend to respond with one of two assumptions: “you can’t really build and grow a business without social media”, and “you need a big audience in order to leave social media”. In this episode, I’ll tackle those two beliefs, share my own story of leaving, and tell you how I reshaped my business without social media.

The relationship I had with social media had always been an uneasy one. Before I started my business, I only lurked on social media, following a few people I’d been following before through their blogs. But when I started my business, I went all in. Because I felt I had to.
I knew—because that’s what I was told—that the more I posted on Instagram, the more my posts would be seen and the more followers I would get.

And I started to resent that quickly. I more and more started to feel like I was working for Instagram much more than that I was working for myself. That the content I created, the connections I tried to forge and the sales I desperately tried to make, were serving Instagram much more than it served me or my business.

And of course that is true—if the app is free, you are the currency.

I got also very annoyed that, at that time, I had to have 10,000 followers in order for people to easily click through to my website, which is where I wanted them. I never got anywhere near those 10,000.

I just couldn’t keep up with all the posting and creating content—and this was when I had few to no clients, so I did have some time for it, even though I also worked four days a week in HE.

So I experimented. I set up a recurring schedule for myself, with Mondays being “Monday mantra”-day—with a small peptalk—, Tuesdays being “sharing about business day”, and Friday being “happylist Friday”, to add some personality and joy. If I had a little more capacity I’d also post something about a current offer on Thursdays.
I wasn’t planning on leaving, really, when I left. But in the course of 2021, I more and more felt that Instagram—and social media in general—just wasn’t aligned to my values. 

I focus on slow and gentle business, on being able to set my own pace, on not being ‘on’ all the time. I began to look into Pinterest as an alternative. Pinterest, though you might see it as social media too, actually calls itself a visual search engine and at least for the time being, doesn’t reward being ‘on’ and your attention that much.

And then, right after launching a guide on business boundaries, I slipped into severe clinical depression and everything ground to a halt. What I had envisioned as a two-week break from Instagram turned into a permanent exit.

I had anything but a large following on Instagram when I left. I don’t have the numbers anymore, but it can’t have been more than 400 followers. I’d shuttered my Facebook page a few years before, and my newsletter had less than 250 subscribers. I had only sort of started with Pinterest. Looking at my website stats, I had about 300 monthly views at that time.

Based on that, leaving social media might sound like business suicide. But it wasn’t.

And that’s my proof that you can both grow a business without social media and leave social media even if you don’t have a big following elsewhere.

You are not likely to miss out on your perfect client or customer because you’re not on social media: research shows that people tend to hang out on several platforms, and several marketing channels, not just one.
But I do get the people who say that you can only grow your business with social media. 

That’s what we see around us—we see all the big businesses on all the channels, and then think we need to do the same. And for some people this advice might be true: social media might have played a huge role in the growth of their business. So it’s no wonder that they give this advice: we tell the stories that are true for us.
But if social media feels off for you, if it doesn’t feel right for you, I’m here to tell you my story—that you really don’t need to be on social media at all.

When I reshaped my marketing, I focused on alignment and making everything work together—and I wanted my marketing to work for me, and for my business. I discuss this in more depth in episode 2, but I used my resentment towards social media to set some parameters for going ahead.
Everything had to flow into each other. I wanted to go beyond just ‘repurposing’ bits of content. I had tried to do this with Instagram, taking little snippets and turning them into Instagram posts. But I still needed a decent picture for that (especially in the days when word-on-text wasn’t that big). And hashtags. 

I also wanted everything to point back to my website, and to make it really easy to click through to my website.
I wanted as much control as possible over my content and how and when I posted. This is very relative of course: I run my website through WordPress, my newsletter through Substack and use Pinterest for pinning. If any of these platforms quit, my presence there is gone.

But at least the rules that these platforms play by are, largely, okay with me. I do protect my content from having backups of all the newsletters, and backing up my subscriber addresses every month.

I want to be offline as much as possible, if I want to and need to. That means that any platform that is part of my marketing ecosystem needs to allow me to schedule.

And finally, tied in with that, I want to focus as much as possible on evergreen marketing—content that doesn’t have a lifecycle of 24 hours, content that isn’t ephemeral or fleeting. That annoyed me so much about Instagram: I’d carefully craft a post which my followers would only see briefly, if at all.

Not only do the different marketing channels I use now align with my own values, they also align with each other.

If you’re fed up with social media, I hope this episode has shown you that you can leave—even if much advice tells you that you can’t.

Because our marketing has to work for us first and foremost. And I promise you, if marketing feels overwhelming and pressured to you now, it can definitely feel better. 

That’s what I support you with in my gentle 4-month marketing programme Grow as well, which—as this episode goes live—is open for enrolment.

My invitation for you is to rethink your reliance on social media if it doesn’t feel right for you. 
You can change up your posting schedule, or leave gradually as you’re building up other channels—or you can leave suddenly, like I did. For a while I had a placeholder post on my Instagram page, which told people to find me elsewhere. Now, my account is completely gone.
And remember, there is no universal right or wrong here. Social media is just a tool.

But there is a right and wrong when it comes to your own business’ marketing: if it feels off, if it doesn’t align with your values or your life, it’s wrong. You get to make the choice.