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If you've seen the title of today's podcast episode and you know me, you're probably a little bit confused because in today's episode, I'm sharing introvert friendly social media strategies. Now, as a raging extrovert, you might think, Tash Corbin, how on earth could you possibly teach me introvert friendly social media strategies? How do you know what's introvert friendly? You're not one of us. But hold your horses, dear listener. Not only do I have social media strategies that are introvert friendly, they're also introvert approved. It's one of the most common reasons people give me that they don't use social media consistently or they don't know how to grow their business on social media.
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But let's face it. At the end of the day, the Internet was built by introvert for introverts, and it can be easier than we think to create introvert friendly social media strategies that actually light you up. So that's exactly what I'm going to walk you through in today's episode of the Heart Centered Business Podcast. This is episode number 477, which means you can find all the relevant links and the show notes for today's episode over at tashcorbin.com/47seven.
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Let's go there. Hello. I'm Tash Corbin, a business strategist and mentor based on the Sunshine Coast in Australia. The mission of this podcast is to help heart centered entrepreneurs to make more money and in doing so, change the world for the better. This podcast was recorded on the lands of the Gubbi Gubbi and Jinnyburra people. Always was, always will be Aboriginal land. Engaging on social media as a business owner can be a huge challenge And there's lots of resistance that comes up, especially for introverts. Even the idea of being exposed to that many people or doing that much peopling can be exhausting and can feel like it's not available to you. Now, as I said at the start of this episode, I am not an introvert. I'm actually an extrovert. I am energized by being in the company and presence of other people. But you may be surprised to find out that being on social media isn't particularly stimulating or energizing for me, but that's because I'm not actually around people. I'm sitting on my own, either on my phone or my laptop, in my office, and the most company I usually have is a dog or two. And so as an extrovert, I also find social media a little draining. It's not my favorite part of my marketing and messaging and sales strategy, but I have created social media strategies that do give me a bit of energy.
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And I also have compartmentalized my time on social media in such a way that the stuff I need to do that feels like I'm a little bit on my own and I'm a little bit like just plugging away is minimized in terms of the time and effort and energy that I need to put into it. And it's automated and systemized as much as possible. And so when I'm on social media, most of the time, it's not for my business. It's actually the parts that I love as an extrovert.
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So what I wanted to do was map out the strategy that I recommend for maximizing your results from social media in-depth. Because as you'll see, as I lay out each piece of this strategy, you can craft this to be very introvert friendly. Now I could also craft this to be quite extrovert friendly, but that's not the purpose of today's podcast episode. If you are an extrovert, you'd like the extrovert friendly version, reach out and let me know because I'm happy to do that. But I rarely get social media, resistance or pushback from extroverts. Maybe that's because extroverts don't wanna admit that they don't want people today because they're extroverts. I don't know. But if you are an extrovert and you want the extrovert friendly version, totally let me know and I'll do it as a future podcast episode. But today, I'm really gonna hone in on the introvert friendly side. So number one, the initial goal of being on social media as a business owner is not what you might think it is. So if you think the goal of being a business owner on social media is to reach as many people as possible and be as visible as possible, I would argue you're looking at the wrong element, especially in the early days of building your strategy. The number one goal of being on social media is giving you access to learn about your niche. It's to learn about the people in your specific niche.
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So you can let go of your attachment to selling or being visible or growing your audience. And instead go deep on understanding them. When you set that as the goal for yourself of being on social media is I want to learn as much as possible about the people within my niche then all of a sudden it takes away a lot of the visibility stuff that might come up for introverts or the fear of the unknown in growing an audience or needing to be on all the time. That's not actually your job.
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In your early days of social media as a business owner, your number one goal should be to get to know the people within your niche in-depth.
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So number two, by showing up on social media with that kind of curiosity, wanting to be a student of the human, We not only then behave and interact on social media in a way that gives you access to that insight and gets you that information but it also means that you're going to connect with more people within your niche especially one on one. And if there's one thing my introvert friends tell me it's that they prefer connecting with other humans one on one over connecting with them on mass.
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So by changing the goal to be learning about your niche, you then show up differently and you get to engage on social media in a way that feels far more sustainable for you as an introvert.
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Now number three, the specifics of what to ask can take some practice. But I would just start with the basics. So when you find people who might be within your niche, can you find out what their goals are, especially in the short to medium term in your zone of genius?
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Find out what they see as the barriers to achieving those goals.
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What do they wish that they could change about their current situation, about their past, about their future? What do they wish that they could change about their actions, their behaviors, their results? What have they tried already and why didn't that work from their perspective?
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What is it that they want to invest in? What are they looking to invest in? And why not hire you? Why wouldn't they hire someone like you? Now I'm just giving you a range of different questions off the top of my head. But imagine if every single individual that you met on social media came with that little dossier, that you had all of those amazing insights into their experience, their hopes, their dreams, their challenges, all of that.
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Imagine being able to build up that resource on each individual that you meet within your niche. Now that's really juicy and powerful insight to how you show up in terms of messaging and content and posts and other things. But ultimately, just knowing those insights about those individuals is deeply powerful and informative for you as a business owner.
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And so now with that approach, number four is let's explore all the ways you could possibly find out that information about the individuals within your niche. So you could be asking questions whether that be on your own social profiles or whether that be in groups or whether that be in the comments of posts of famous people online where these conversations might be happening.
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Engaging with people within your niche, whether you know or not at first doesn't matter. Right? Or they might be in the niche.
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Okay. Well, I'm gonna ask them some questions. Right? And not through the lens of like, I have a business. I'd like to ask you some questions. But like, if someone's online whinging about the fact that they can't seem to keep up to date with all of the laundry and you're a household management specialist who helps people keep up to date with all of their household tasks, why not ask? Like, oh, what kind of things have you tried before? Why do you think it's such a challenge for you?
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What kind of help would you be looking for? What does the ideal solution look like for you? Now I don't mean pepper them with all four questions, but see how many questions I could ask someone who's whinging about the thing that I'm the person who could help with that? Like just asking questions in all of the places that you can can be so powerful. And because you're just asking a question of one individual you don't feel like you're exposed. You don't feel like you're as much needing to be on stage. You're just chatting to a new biz bestie, a new friend. That's all. You might pose some theories and see what people respond to in those theories. Oh, I've got this theory about business mindset. Here's what it is. What do you think? See what their responses are. Give advice and see what questions people ask in relation to that advice or see where people disagree with your advice. That's one of the things you can always count on on social media.
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You could offer out free sessions on things that you think that they might be keen for help with and just see, like, are they actually keen for it? I discovered when I first started my business that the things I thought people wanted my help with, they actually didn't care about.
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They would say, oh, yeah, that sounds really great, but could you help me with setting up my mailing list? And I'll be like, oh, yeah. I can totally do that. But don't you wanna know how to, like, get a hundred people onto your mailing list in the next ten days? Nope. I just need to know how to get a form up so that if I do have something I want people to sign up for, they can sign up for it. Encourage questions about certain subtopics. So let's say your business is specifically about meal planning.
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So rather than just say, what are your questions about meal planning? You might say, what are your questions about preparing for your grocery shop?
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What are your questions about meal planning for breakfasts? What are your questions about meal planning when you have disparate schedules in your household? What are your questions about, the cost savings in meal planning, right? Or whatever it might be. How to save money when it comes to meal planning? So encouraging questions about subtopics to really dive deep with individuals. Asking friends to tag you, refer you if people need x y zed thing from you. Being willing to chat to people who aren't an exact fit to further understand why they're not an exact fit. Right? So if see how when we've changed the goal, we've got clear on what it is that we're there for, being curious and creating a little dossier on each individual that we come across, and then showing up with that curiosity and and some ideas of the types of things you wanna learn about people, you're now able to explore all of these different ways. And out of all of those different ways, you can find the ones that feel like they're more friendly for your version of introversion.
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You might find it much easier to do things like surveys or polls or quizzes. Interview people.
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Ask what books people love in your topic area.
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Right? So let's say you're an expert in energetic alignment. Right? What are your favorite books about energetic alignment? And then go and look at the three star reviews of those books. Because you know what people do when they leave a three star review? They explain what was good and what was bad, what was missing. Three star reviews are a great way to get insights about what's missing in your market. So think about, like, all of the books. Even you could do this without having to talk to another human. Think about all the books that people read in your topic area. What are the most popular ones? Go and read the three star reviews of those books. And I bet I bet bet bet you'll get a bunch of insights as to what people think is missing and what people are wanting further information on. Oh, it didn't go deep enough into x, y, zed. Right. Now I can go and create some content around that and schedule it up onto my social so I don't even need to be there when it sees the light of day.
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In a lot of cases, when people embrace social media through this lens of really wanting to be a student of the human, really wanting to get curious about the individuals in their niche, one of the biggest insights that they get is that they're trying to solve too many things for too many people. And of course, as an introvert, that's probably a big red flag as to why you might be avoiding social media. Because if you feel like you are spread thin, you are doing too many things for too many people, that is certainly going to make your little introvert batteries depleted over and over again whenever you're showing up online and probably not just on social media. So there you have it.
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The stages of developing a social media strategy and how to do it in an introvert friendly way, finding the things that really work for you. The final thing I will say is that when it comes to showing up on social media, for most people, they are spending far too much time and they're not being strategic enough with the time that they spend on social media. So if you are someone who finds it particularly draining or you're not particularly loving social media, you'd prefer not to use social media in your business, but you feel like you need to because it is one of the cheapest, most prolific, and easy ways to access new audience members and grow your business and make sales, then my biggest piece of advice is boundary up your time and really stick to those time limits. So when I'm, feeling particularly depleted because I have chronic illness and I've definitely had some periods where I can only do five hours of work a week. Right. I need to do all of my social media stuff in under two hours a week, under one and a half hours a week. And I've done I've had to do that for months and months on end in certain phases of my business. Right? So it's for me the reason why I wasn't showing up on social media or I didn't have time for social media wasn't because it depleted me in terms of being an introvert.
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It was simply that I just couldn't do anything. And so I needed to be very mindful of using my time. I was still able to do everything I needed to do from a strategic perspective on social media in under ninety minutes a week.
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I would set myself up, but I had to have a system around it. Because if I just open the Facebook app and faff about for ninety minutes, that's not gonna grow my business. That's not me doing a good job as the CEO of my business. That's me flouncing around doing something that's not particularly effective and then getting upset when it doesn't work and I feel like I've wasted my time. That's not helping anyone. So boundary up your time on social media. Get really clear on what it is that you are and are not doing on social media and what your strategy is, and then just show up and do that stuff. But for most people, the stuff that they decide to do is not the stuff that's gonna grow your business. It's not this getting to know the individuals within your niche. It's just trying to post random dancing videos pointing at stuff or random reels or random posts that follow these daily prompt themes or you're using AI or swipe copy and it's not even your voice. It's not even original content. It's just a conglomeration or a big mishmash of stuff that other people have already shared. And then you wonder why it doesn't work. That's not being strategic.
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So instead, focus on what is the core driver. What is the core goal of you being on social media for this phase of your business? And get about being strategic about how you do that in very boundaried, very limited time. Now there are ways that I support people to do that. I definitely love teaching people how to do their social content in a really, optimised but imperfect way that allows you to not have to be on social media every day through my imperfect post project. I run that from time to time inside my programs, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But I'm not here to sell something to you today. What I want you to do is to craft a strategy based on those steps and give yourself the gift of actually putting it in place and doing that for fifteen minutes a day for the next five days and see the difference that it makes when you actually go onto social media with a very clear purpose that's aligned to the stage of business that you're at and you show up in a way that's actually useful to you, your business, your audience. And if you do discover that you're trying to be too many things to too many people and you need to narrow your niche down and be more specific, I do have a free training on how to nail your niche, which I'll link to in the show notes. And I will also link to a couple of previous podcast episodes where I've talked about social media streamlining and social media strategy as well. If you want to dive a little deeper into the specifics, of course, if you want more mentorship through that, you'd like to explore what the options are to get my support to craft a strategy that actually works and is aligned to your strengths. Please do reach out and get in touch. But those free resources will definitely help you to move forward in a way that feels far more friendly to who you are and your strengths and the things that strengthen you. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of the Heart Centred Business Podcast. Remember, those show notes and links are available at tashcorbin.com/470seven. And until next time, I cannot wait to see you shine. Bye for now.