The following is a guest video from Teachable creator, Andrea Jones. With over 7 years experience in the game, Andréa hosts the acclaimed podcast, the Savvy Social Podcast, leads a team providing done-for-you service inside of her marketing agency that was named a Top Digital Marketing Agency in 2021, and serves over 200 students in her membership, the Savvy Social School. You can find her online at onlinedrea.com or @onlinedrea on Instagram. And download her Instagram Mindset Guide. In honor of Teachable’s Creator Month, in which we celebrate and share the expertise of creators everywhere, Andrea discusses the relationship between social media and emotions.

Video transcript

Social media can be such a mixed bag of emotions for many content creators. On the one hand, it’s amazing because we find the perfect students for our courses, or clients for our programs.

On the other hand, kind of sexist into Doom, scrolling, and mind numbing activities. So in this video, I want to take a moment to help you develop some social media strategies that will work for you and not against you.

My name is Andrea Jones, and I’m a social media strategist over at online drag calm, and I learned many of these strategies the hard way. So I’m really excited to bring these to you. So you can actually learn to love social media again. Now, my first tip is to really understand your relationship with social media. And what that means for a lot of us as content creators is drawing a line in the sand between personal social media usage, and professional social media usage.

So what that looks like for me is when I’m looking at cute dog videos, that’s personal time. When I’m looking for networking opportunities with—let’s say podcasts—is so I can be on their show and talk about my program. That’s business time. And so making sure that I have those two separated really helps me understand where my time is going when I’m actually spending time on on social media, and to help me really be clear about sticking with those habits that actually move the needle forward in my business.

My second tip is one of my favorites, and it is to turn off all of your notifications. Yes, it is possible to live a life free from social media notifications. I did this in 2017. After going through a period of time where I was feeling overly anxious and constantly checking my phone, I turned off notifications and haven’t looked back. And yes, it is a little bit challenging. At first, you may miss a notification or two. But what happens is when you’re checking into social media, you’re intentionally showing up and being present. This means when you’re recording videos, or creating content for your courses, you’re being present in that moment. And then when it’s time to check Instagram, you’re being present in that moment.

So by turning off your notifications, you’re actually allowing yourself to be more creative. As a content creator, you’re allowing your time on social media to be more productive. And then you’re also allowing your downtime to actually be downtime. So you’re not distracted by an Instagram notification, or tweet, or anything like that. And my last tip is to curate your experience on social media. There happens to be a lot of negativity on social media. There is this natural tendency as content creators to start comparing ourselves to other content creators.

So what I recommend is make sure that your experience is highly curated. You can decide exactly who you want to follow and who you don’t want to follow. Don’t worry about other people’s feelings. Focus on you and what you want to get out of that experience. So what that looks like for me is there are certain people online who I was kind of following because I wanted to keep up with them. But secretly, I didn’t really like anything that they were posting. Yeah, those people are unfollowed. Now, I encourage you to do the same. And what that means for me is that when I stopped following a ton of family members on my accounts, it actually separated out a lot where my friends and family are mostly on Facebook, and my Instagram account is for business. And it really works for me, because then I’m not distracted by someone having a baby or getting married. I’m really focused on the work things when they matter, and then focus on the family when that matters as well.

If you found these tips helpful, I want to invite you to download my free mindset guide. It’s called the Instagram Mindset Guide so you can apply it to any platform. And the goal behind it is to help you as a creator be able to show up on social media but not at the expense of you. So check it out for free with the link that goes along with this video.