The Social Media Slow Down
As we near Summer Solstice in Turtle Island/ Canada we start to feel the warmth this season brings and the call to bask in it. We want to share an inside scoop of a practical business operations decision that we made for 2022 Costron + Co marketing. We hope this tangible example gives insight into how pushing relentlessly can move us farther away from how we define success in our businesses.
To the awareness of the Costron + Co community, or not, at the end of 2021 we decided as a company to evaluate our marketing strategy. This decision came from our heart centered awareness of wanting to pursue avenues of marketing that feel deeply good for our creativity, creating intentional impact and cultivating meaningful relationships in our community.
In our evaluation we curated a list of marketing endeavours we were currently pursuing and ones that we could possibly consider. The list of course was endless of the spaces we could create systems, processes and content for. We knew we couldn’t do it all.
At this time one area that we were looking at closely was our relationship with social media. Jacquie and I both felt, from a personal standpoint, that social media wasn’t a space we loved living in. For myself it was a place where I noticed patterns of addiction to my device and not being fully connected to the beauty of what was alive and well right in front of me. I noticed that I was being sucked into a culture of comparison and pulled away from my divine self. I noticed that I was being pulled into other people’s aspirations, successes, and celebrations and pushed out of my own intentions for how I wanted to be in heart centered alignment with self, loved one, Costron + Co and Find Your Voice Music Therapy. I noticed that I was in a grind to produce online content, and this was not the sole way I wanted to make connections with people.
We asked the question, what would happen if we allow this current social media structure and system to continue. It led to a perpetuation of stress, overwhelm, and hustle.
We don’t feel in alignment with our heart and authentic self
We are consistently noting a pattern of low creativity and motivation
We feel like we are running out of time to focus on what is important with us in cultivating intentional, live connections with our community
We feel there is a weight on our shoulders, deflated and are in a negative mood
We knew a change needed to happen. In collaboration with Abi, Brand and Marketing Strategist with Costron + Co, we connected to what was important to us with our 2022 marketing strategy. For us that was to focus on authentic connection with our community and networks. One element of this was to pull back from our social media presence and focus our content creation on brand awareness and education. So we were able to focus our other marketing efforts to live, in person/ online connections with partnerships and community members.
We reduced our social media posts by 50-75% per month. The idea of this shift was certainly terrifying as the social media marketing “shoulds” flooded our thoughts and systems. The answer, returning to our heart and connecting to virtues of wisdom, loving kindness, compassion. Practicing what we preach at Costron + Co with making decisions for our business in alignment with heart. So we are running our business from a place of being deeply well, and our business is not running us.
Now that it’s been 5 months of honouring this new space of “social media slow down” I tangibly feel the results of listening to this part of us that was guiding us towards alignment of heart. There is an increased abundance of creativity + love in the social media content that we intentionally curate each month. And we are able to intentionally focus on other meaningful avenues of connection in our business.
