A social media strategy for folks afraid of social media

I'm not sure why, but I really don't like posting things on social media. I find the idea of it stressful, and sometimes sort of scary! Usually the advice I hear at this point is to just avoid it, or to pick one you like and do it well, but, since I've gotten serious at looking for my first developer job, I have realized I really can't avoid social media completely. And, even though it's not exactly necessary*, it would probably be helpful for me to be on more than one platform.

So, last week I started to troubleshoot this. If I couldn't avoid social media completely, I needed to find some way to engage with it that I was comfortable with.

So what did make me uncomfortable with social media? I still haven't quite figured this one out, but thinking more deeply about it made me realize I wasn't uncomfortable with all social media, or with all kinds of posts either. This seemed like a good place to start. What kinds of things made me really uncomfortable, versus what kinds of things did I feel better about, and how could I work within this?

I started by thinking about what sorts of things I usually post on the social media I do use (mostly cat pictures), and then, working from there, made a chart to nail this down further:

This was a start! It skewed more heavily towards detail in things I'm (mostly) fine posting about, but that's because that's what I really wanted there: ideas for (coding-related!) things to post about on social media. The other important part of this process for me was to take certain things off the table. For example, if posting about things that are too personal makes me uncomfortable? Fine, I could put it in the "nope" column and then stop worrying about it.

From here, I made a list of relevant things I could post about, and on what platforms, to give myself a more specific idea of what to do going forward. Another thing that makes me reluctant to post is uncertainty about what I'm going to post, so the goal was to take that off the table.

My list:

• technical blog posts (Dev.to, with cross-post to Twitter and LinkedIn)
• posts highlighting coding projects (Dev.to, Twitter, LinkedIn)
• challenges like #100daysofCode (Twitter, possibly blog about experience and cross-post)
• answering code questions (Twitter, Dev.to)
• engaging on coding-related posts (Dev.to, LinkedIn, Twitter)

And that's it! So far. The next step, of course, is to increase the frequency of all of these things, and to test my theory that I'll be able to do this without spending too much time worrying about what I'm posting--my usual stumbling block. And then, of course, analyze, reiterate, and test again.

The steps again, for anyone else interested in trying this:

1. Think about what makes you uncomfortable about engaging with social media
2. Make a chart of types of engagement that make you more/less comfortable
3. Make a list of comfortable/mostly comfortable things to have on hand for when you're telling yourself 'I need to post something' but are stuck on the pressure of doing it
4. Probably have some sort of schedule for creating content (that one is a work in progress for me!)

I hope this is helpful to anyone else trying to push themselves in this direction! (And, just for fun, here is another picture of my cat!)

*Seriously, I have heard from many folks who know a lot more than I do that if you're not going to do the social media thing you might as well just not have it, as long as your online presence is consistent and professional and doesn't have abandoned handles, but, I am trying this anyway!

Comments

[Sarah Price]

I have a certificate in digital marketing so I think this is a great way of breaking down what you want to post about. Focusing on code related topics will help your personal brand and help you stand out from the crowd. I also love that you consider what other platforms to cross promote and publish on. Twitter and Linkedin on both great. I would also encourage you to consider Pinterest, as it's a really great resource for bloggers. You can easily create Pinterest pins for your blog with Canva and create some alternative versions to help drive traffic. Thanks for sharing!

[Sam Markham]

Thanks Sarah! I'm glad you liked the post (especially from a marketing perspective!), and thanks for the suggestion about Pinterest too! I will look into that.

[yerixo]

Thank you for these strategies for posting posts on social networks. I've always had a fear of writing posts on Facebook and Instagram. I'm afraid everyone will laugh at me. I'm ashamed to write a long post about my worries because my subscribers won't understand my thoughts. I believe that everyone will think: Why has she continuously published photos without a signature and now decided to publish such a long text? I ordered an ad on famoid.com for your Instagram account with drawings. They will publish texts under my pictures. Even now, I'm worried that my subscribers will unsubscribe from me because of the change in the visual of my account...

[eatyourvegetablesHYI]

.good points and a really helpful strategy.do you think one should make a personal handle and a programmer/dev handle or will it just get too much?

[Sam Markham]

Thank you!

And re: making a different handle, I have some thoughts, but also some disclaimers first! One, I'm not 100% sure what all of the benefits and drawbacks to this are, this is just what I've found/heard from more knowledgeable folks so far, and two, I'm not personally focusing on how best to get engagement on posts, just on how to get myself to post the things in the first place!

With all of that said though, I think it depends! (1) You should probably maintain the handles you do have, so if maintaining more than one feels like too much work, maybe just stick to one, but also (2) you want something that makes sense for your online presence if someone looks you up in a programmer context.

For me personally, I write novels as well as code, so I have a Twitter that's pretty much for that. I didn't think merging those two things made sense, as they have pretty different audiences, and I didn't want potential future employers to look me up, just see the novelist handle, and get confused about if I was the same person or not! If it weren't for this I might have just started posting programming stuff on my personal twitter, as long as the rest of that twitter was something I would be comfortable with folks associating with me in a professional context.