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Steph Crowder
Foreign welcome to the Courage and Clarity Podcast. I'm your host, Steph Crowder. I'm a former sales training director who's helped thousands of entrepreneurs earn a living doing something they love over the past 10 years. On your journey, you'll need the courage to be bold, to take risks, and to do what looks crazy on paper. You'll also need the clarity, the brass tacks, simple strategies that actually work. And on this podcast, we deliver both in equal measure. Oh, and by the way, we've got absolutely no time for bs, gross marketing tactics or get rich quick schemes. Just sustainable business strategies for good humans with big dreams. If that sounds like you, you're in the right place. Let's go. Hello, Hello CNC listeners. Welcome to the podcast. This is episode number 129 let's talk about Social Media let's talk about social media in the year 2025. This is a topic I have been thinking a lot about lately and I've been getting client questions about it and I've been really sitting with my thoughts and finally kind of have had a little bit of a light bulb go off. I shared about it on my Instagram, if you're not already following me over there. I am at hey Steph Crowder and I put up a post about my current thoughts about being on Instagram and my journey on Instagram and it's gotten a lot of traction. I've gotten a lot of great responses to that post, which is actually gonna be pretty ironic when I tell you my thoughts about social media right now. It's a little bit of a ironic moment, but it was a post that really seemed to bring up some great conversation. As I mentioned, it's been a topic of conversation with my clients and I just think it's a really great time to address what the heck is going on with social media. I'm going to be talking about Instagram in particular, but the truth of the matter is I think you can apply this to any platform that you might be on. Instagram is just the one that I have used most and most consistently with my business over the course of the time that I've been around. I am on TikTok, I like posting over there. I'm on Facebook, not so much these days. I'm really not on LinkedIn. I know a lot of you listening are, but I think everything I'm about to share with you can absolutely be applied a question I've been getting from my clients recently and again I'm going to say Instagram, but go ahead and just, you know, insert the platform of your choice. My clients have been asking me questions such as, is Instagram really worth our time anymore? As business owners, my clients will report that they feel sort of deflated and discouraged by the engagement or the lack thereof that they're getting on Instagram. They might feel like, you know, I spend all this time. A lot of people also report that they feel they're spending a lot of time, you know, maybe 10, 15 hours of your week feels like it's going to social media. And a lot of times I think it's very natural to have the thought, why am I sinking all of this time into this platform for so little return? There's also been plenty of conversation around the question of saturation, right? Like, is there. The question sounds like, is there even opportunity to grow on Instagram anymore? Folks feel like growth is impossible, really, really difficult, if not impossible. And so I think it is just such a natural question, very logical question to be like, is this worth my time? Is this where I should be spending some. Some of my time, a portion of my time in my business? And it's such a good question that it's one that I've had to sit with. Like I said, I've been kind of sitting on this question. I've been coaching my clients about it, but I think I've had my own thoughts brewing on the matter. And as I mentioned a minute ago, I've had a bit of a light bulb go off for me, and so I'm gonna share where I am at on my social media journey. This will certainly inform how I'm coaching my clients and, you know, how I'm guiding the folks in my sphere to engage with social media. And I'm hopeful that with this episode, it can give you a bit of. I think there is absolutely a reframe that I'm going to give you here. If you've been feeling but discouraged with social media, you've been feeling like, God, I don't. Don't even want to be on this thing anymore. I totally get it. I think, as is typical of a courage and clarity episode, part of what I'm going to be doing here is inspiring you, inspiring you to see it differently and to let go of some of that discouragement with some new thoughts that I have for you. So, for me personally, I think it's important for me to mention I am what you might consider an Instagram og, An Instagram dinosaur. Not that my following is giant or anything, but it's just that I've Been on the platform for a long time. I was thinking about it and I remember posting on Instagram in 2011. Okay, so I remember back then, if y'all were on Instagram at that time, my goodness, it was like heavily filtered, grainy photos. It's kind of hilarious. I remember posting these pictures of what I was doing around Chicago. I think I. If you want to scroll all the way back, you'll probably find it. I think I had like a. Like a really. What I thought was like a really artsy photo of a ballpark hot dog at Wrigley Field. Right? Like, that was what we did on Instagram back in the day. And so then as I started becoming interested in online business, blogging, entrepreneurship, my Instagram started to reflect that. And then certainly by 2014 even, yeah, 2014, when I was, you know, really getting serious about, okay, I want to have my own business. That is for the very most part, what I have been sharing on Instagram ever since is, you know, business coaching, growing your business. Certainly lots of glimpses into my life. Some of my personal life is there, but for the most part, it has been a platform for me to grow and connect with an audience. And I certainly think I've, you know, had plenty of clients come to me who have followed me on Instagram for a while. I don't know that they necessarily discovered me through Instagram, but I think, and this is going to go into one of my points for today, is I absolutely think Instagram has become a bit of an. A business card, a digital business card, right? Where if you're going to hire somebody, I don't know about you all, but if you're going to hire somebody, if you're going to work with someone, you're probably going to look them up on Instagram first. I know I do. And, you know, I'll start following them. And regardless of how much they post, I just kind of want to see, like, what. I think the thought in my brain is like, I want to see what this person's all about, right? I want to see, like, how they present themselves. And so Instagram has really turned into not only a platform for sharing, but also a bit of, you know, sort of like your shingle. You know, you have your website, but you also have this shingle that you've hung out on social media. Instagram can be a place where, you know, I hear these days are the youth, the kids these days, days sometimes are exchanging Instagrams before they exchange phone numbers. Hey, can I get your Instagram? Can I get your TikTok. I've heard the youngins saying that to each other, and I think that's. That's really interesting for me. And I. If you've been on Instagram for a while, you probably relate to this. I have certainly noticed the platform has changed so much in the time that I've been on there. And that I want to start by saying is very normal in the time that I've been a business coach. I. When I first came on the scene in 20, 2015 is when I started podcasting and working at Fizzle. Instagram was really not. Not used as a business platform back then. It was Twitter. Twitter was really where, like, the big dogs were. And in. So I just look back and I'm like, man, Twitter was like the spot. And then into like Facebook, Facebook to Instagram. And then there have been. And then TikTok, right? There have been a number of other platforms that have come and gone. You could think About Periscope or anchor.fm, if you remember them. Clubhouse. Anybody remember Clubhouse? I mean, so many little platforms have popped up and some have stuck and others not so much. And even for the platforms that have stuck, like Instagram, it is normal for a platform, but not just platforms. We could think about marketplaces. I like to think about marketplaces, and any marketplace is going to go through a maturation curve. What does that mean? It means that when. Let's just think about a market, like a new product or a new industry, in the beginning, it is a bit of a gold rush, right? It's like brand new, tons of opportunity, blue ocean. Not a lot of rules, not a lot of really anything, right? It's just like there's a market need and people kind of rush in and they're early. You have your early, early adopters, right? So you could have the thought, like, oh, people who are early adopters on Instagram may have had more of an opportunity, right? You could think that. Not necessarily a fact, but sure. We can. We can. We can go with that. And then the platform starts to mature, right? Where what happens is more and more people are coming onto the platform using the platform. And one way of putting it is the marketplace does become more and more crowded. Okay, this is where I think we go wrong in our thinking. We think to ourselves, oh, it's crowded. There's no more opportunity. We can say the same thing about podcasts, by the way, when I first started podcasting, nobody knew what the hell a podcast was. So people were like, podcast? What is. What is that? I'm serious. I'm not even playing. That's how it was. These days, everybody has a podcast. It feels like, you know, everybody. Like, no one hasn't heard of podcasts. There's no one out there who's not listening to podcasts. And so you could have the thought, oh, man, everybody's podcasting. Like, there's no room for me to be a podcaster. Or you could also have the thought, there's more listeners than any ever. That's what I like to think about. It's like, there's never been this many people out there listening to podcasts, and that can be really exciting. So, yes, you have some saturation, but you also have an increase in user usership. There's more people on Instagram now than ever before. Okay, so I remember in 20, let's call it like, 2017, 2018, 2019, even into 2020, Instagram, for me was, like, a lovely place to be. I was on my stories all the time. I would hop on stories, and I feel like I was talking to so many of you. I feel like I was always getting DMs, I was always getting comments. My stuff was getting a lot of reach and a lot of views. And so recently, I keep carrying the thought and the story. Instagram's not what it used to be. Kind of melodramatic, right? Oh, I miss when you Instagram used to be such and such and such. I've been really thinking that a lot lately, and I've been showing up a little here and there. But I can just feel that, you know, when I post, I may not get so many likes. I may not get any comments if I go on my stories, may not get any replies. And that can feel really discouraging, especially when you're used to something else. On top of that, you hear a lot of people talking about taking a break from social media, right? And like, some of the. I think it's interesting, a few back in that time that. That time frame I mentioned the, you know, late 2010s, everybody was sharing their whole life. The same thing happened with Facebook. If you think about it, if you're old enough to recall this Facebook, that used to be a moment. Like when I was in college, your photos from the night before would hit the Facebook album. If Facebook was huge for us, right, we would share your whole life on Facebook. Same with Instagram. You share your whole life. Then it kind of reaches a point where it's like. It almost feels like it's not cool to do that anymore. I've had A lot of friends in my personal life be like, I'm not posting on Instagram anymore. And I think I took a look at that and was like, well, I want to be cool. Like, I don't want to seem. There's like, this element of I don't want to be caught trying too hard, looking like, I'm trying too hard on Instagram. I'm not proud of any of these thoughts, by the way. I'm just. Y'all were all friends here, so I'm giving you my honest, kind of unfiltered relationship with Instagram lately. And so I kind of pulled back, and it's really convincing and easy to pull back when you have thoughts like, this isn't healthy for me anyway. Right. Like, this isn't a place I want to spend my time. I'm, you know, like, keep checking for likes and keep checking for comments, and I keep scrolling and I keep not getting work done. Like, there's actually a lot of. From. Again, back to my clients who are asking me, is this even worth it? You could come up with a lot of reasons why it's not worth it to be on these platforms. Okay? So I was pretty convinced that taking a step back from social media was going to be good for me and for my business, and I was wrong. I was wrong about that. I wouldn't go back and revise it. I'm not saying that I, like, made a mistake, per se. I'm just saying that I'm changing my perspective moving forward. I've, like, finally broken through to the other side of the thoughts of, like, nobody cares and nobody's out there and nobody's listening to me. I've really, again, finally had that light bulb go off for me. And here's what it is, and here's what I want to offer you. By the way, spoiler alert, if you're not following me on Instagram. I've announced that I'm going to be. I'm. I'm. I'm, like, doing the opposite now. I'm challenging myself self to post on Instagram or TikTok. Mostly Instagram, but we'll throw some TikTok in there as well. For 100 days in a row. I've done seven days so far, so definitely at the beginning of this journey. But if I fall off, I'm just gonna double up on a day. Okay, so I've literally swung in the opposite direction. Why? Why would I do that? Well, the first thing is I recognized the feelings that I had about the late 2010s for what they really were. And that was external validation, right? It's easy to judge. I see this a lot with my clients. They'll be like, I can tell you, Steph, that Instagram is not working because I post and I get zero likes, or I post and I get three likes, or I post and I get one comment, right? And I've had those thoughts, too. I'm not. I'm, like, literally right there with my clients. Like, I'm hearing them, and I'm like, yeah, you're right, it's tough. But when I was thinking about what made me feel, quote, good and natural in the late 2010s, it was an external validation factory for me, right? Like, pumping out the dopamine, pumping out the, oh, wow, they like me. Of course, it was, quote, easy for me to show up on the platform when that's how it felt. Right? So that, of course, caused me to have the thought, well, what used to work just isn't working anymore. They used to like me and now they don't. They used to see my stuff and now they don't. Right? And of course, that led me to have the thought, like, maybe this is over. Maybe this is just, like, not gonna be how where I build my community anymore. But the. When I said I was wrong, the thing I was wrong about was where the problem actually lied. The problem wasn't the platform. Okay? I kept thinking, like, everything I just shared made me say, this platform is. Is problematic. Right? It's over. I'm done with it. Like, enough. But it turned out I actually had two problems, and neither of them had anything to do with Instagram itself. Instagram is inert. Right, guys? Instagram is sentient. Being Instagram is not morally good or bad. It is just a platform. Okay, I've definitely heard some villainization of Instagram and social media in general. Oh, social media is bad. No, social media is not inherently bad. In fact, there's a lot of good. Lot of good. I don't know that I'd have a business without social media at the end of the day. Okay. But here's where I think we have to think about how we play into, like, we are half of the equation. The platform is just part of the equation. We ourselves and how we engage with that platform, I think, is where things get more interesting. So problem number one for me was my expectations. Okay, so you heard it when I was sharing before, I was definitely expecting my community to engage in a certain way. I felt entitled to the results. I've been having a Lot of entitlement lately. I'm going to share more about. I'm going to do a whole episode about entitlement. Okay? And I see it in clients and I see it in myself. It can be very sneaky, especially when you're used to getting results in the past, right? It sounds like I used to do all this stuff and I got all these results, and now I'm doing the same thing and it's not working. What the hell? Where are my results? Right? But here's what I realize now. 2025 is different. It's not better or worse. It's just that users have changed. This is where I was going wrong. I was like, well, they don't care anymore. They're not buying here. They're not. They don't. They don't like this. They've moved on. Instagram's not cool anymore. Whatever. All of those thoughts right now, what I really see, 2025 is the year of the lurker. Your community is there. They're watching. It's just that likes and comments are no longer the currency. Likes and comments used to be everything. That's how you could tell if things were going well. But these days, attention is the new currency. And the thing about attention, remember, there's more people. There's more people. It's like a room. It's like a. It's like a room. It's like the crowd is bigger in the room, but it doesn't necessarily mean that they're talking to you more, but they are watching. The thing about attention, and this can be really difficult for us to get on board with, but attention is harder to measure. It's going to require a leap of faith. Here's what I mean. Lots of people. This is what I've discovered. Lots of people are just kind of driving by on Instagram, right? They are. What? You see this, right? You're like, people are watching my stories. Ain't nobody saying anything, and it's so annoying, right? They're watching your stories. They're not saying anything. They're looking at your post. They're not taking the moment to like it. But think about that for a second. Don't you do the same thing? I know I do. I might be on TikTok and doing a little bit of scrolling. I might be laughing my ass off. And I forget, like, I. Since I'm a creator, I always try to hit the like button because it's like, I appreciate likes, but not. There are plenty of moments where I don't do that, where I'm just like, oh, God, that was so funny. That was so cool. That was so interesting. That was so insightful. And then I just don't engage with it, and it doesn't mean that it didn't impact me. Right? And importantly for those of us who are business owners who are, remember, let's not forget why we're on these platforms, guys. We're not on these platforms for notoriety. At least I don't think that's why. If you're listening to my podcast, I don't think you're trying to be an influencer. Okay? No shame if you are. But like most of my clients, that's not what they're trying to do. You're trying to get clients, you're trying to get more sales. You're trying to fill up your book, okay? You don't need to be the most popular. You don't need to have the most likes. You don't need to have the most comments. What do you have to do? You just have to be in their brain. You have to remind them that you exist. You have to show up and lead them. Oh, boy. We're gonna talk about leadership, right? Just because they're just driving by and they just watched your reel and didn't engage with it doesn't mean that you didn't do your job and that Instagram didn't do its job of reminding them, oh, there's Steph Crowder. Oh, yeah, Steph Crowder. I was thinking about working with her. Oh, yeah, Steph Crowder. I haven't listened to her podcast this week. Right. I don't necessarily have tangible evidence for measuring the success of that. A lot of you are wanting to be like, but how do I measure it? But how do I measure it? You gotta let that go. You can measure. So, like, certainly if some posts are doing better than others, then hell yeah, like, lean into that. But for example, I had a reel that I posted yesterday. It got six likes. I'm not gonna sit here and be like, that didn't work. I know that. Lots of people saw it. It was shown to, like, 700 people or something. And I can have the thought, that worked more than I'm able to measure, okay? And I know that's true, and I've had some people tell me this as well, that just because their engagement has, quote, unquote, gone down doesn't mean that their sales have. And this is true for me as well. Even though I told you all that my most quote unquote popular years on Instagram were the late 2010s, those weren't my best sales years. My best sales year was last year. Okay. But it's probably gonna be replaced by this year. And it's like, what if your Instagram engagement isn't a measure of how well you're going to sell? Being present and reminding people that you're there is a huge reason. I mean, for me, that's like the entire reason to be on there. And the other thing with that is the leadership that I mentioned, right? Remember how I said that Instagram is kind of like a business card? When somebody comes to check me out and they're thinking about working with me, they want me to lead. They don't want me to be quiet. They're struggling with their own, like, inner, you know, like, upper limit beliefs, right? They're struggling to show up. They don't want to hire a coach who's not going to show up. They want to see somebody modeling the hard stuff. So I'm going to show up. I'm going to show up to show my clients and my future clients that I know how to show up. I'm gonna lead my community, right? I'm gonna have the courage to lead before the external validation is gonna promise me that's gonna make me feel better. I'm gonna lead because that's what I'm here to do. Thought leadership is the reason to be on social media in 2025. One thing I've said on my own platform that I'll say here as well, is even though my relationship with social media has been a little bit fraught, I've never stopped wanting to be a thought leader. It's like one of the number one desires that I have when it comes to my business is I want to be the best in my industry and one of the best, right? I want to be known as. Oh, yeah, like her voice in the industry, you always got to listen to Steph Crowder. She's got the best advice. She's like, so real, so authentic, so honest, so transparent. Her leadership is top notch. How am I going to claim all that if I'm not willing to show up on Instagram just because it can be uncomfortable when people aren't validating me? Like, that's not what leadership is. Leadership is launching forth before success is certain. Right? And so that's what I'm going to be doing for these next 100 days on Instagram, regardless of what's coming back. I mean, again, I will lean into the content types that are creating the most conversation. Absolutely. But am I going to be discouraged by one post that only got six likes? Absolutely not. Absolutely not. In fact, I'm not even really going to be looking at that. Just going to keep going, right? The second. The second problem that I had that I want to share that was causing my fraught relationship with social media was my own habits. Okay? The problem was never Instagram itself. The problem was jumping on my phone every down moment that I had. Oh, let me go in a loop of email, Slack, Instagram, TikTok. Email, Slack, Instagram, TikTok. You know what I'm talking about, right? That is, that creates like this erosion in my critical thinking. I get brain fog. I'm not focused. I'm like, oh, my God, I just lost 15 minutes. Like, what was I even doing right? Remember, this is not social media's fault. This is about how we engage with it. This is also known as a boundary. Okay? So increasing the boundaries that we have around social media. And the great news is there's never been more tools available to help us with this. So my two favorite tools for this hundred day project that I'm doing are brick. I've talked about brick before. It's a little magnetic square that comes in the mail. You tell it what apps you want to block and you scan it. I stick mine on my fridge and I walk away. You cannot go back on those apps until you go and scan it again. It is a game changer. Okay? So I can't scroll, like right now as I record this podcast I can't get on my social media. I've chosen the apps that I'm not allowed to go on during my workday. So if you can't have a boundary with your brain, it's okay. These apps are highly addictive. Get yourself a little help. Brick helps me so much. And the second tool is Later. Later is a scheduling program. And so I can make my content for these hundred days and push it out and only spend. I'm still gonna spend about 30 minutes a day, number one, enjoying social media, because social media is enjoyable. There's nothing wrong with laughing at reels and TikToks. Right? But I'm also going to spend those 30 minutes replying to any comments that come in, engaging with my clients and my peers, platform or presences. Right? So I can spend 23.5 hours offline and 30 minutes online. What I want to say about this is you can have a social media presence without being present on social media all the time. You can have a social media presence strategically without being present on social media all the time. And something about that, like, has really clicked for me. I was convincing myself, like, this stuff isn't even good for me anyway. Like, all the studies show that social media is so damaging and so terrible and all of the things. And it's like, it's just a tool. It's just a tool like any other tool. And I know that when I'm asking clients to come and work with me, I want to be able to show them a preview of what I'm like. I want to be able to show them that I'm here. I'm not afraid. I'm not afraid to take up space. Absolutely not. I claim my stage, and I want you to come with me. That's what I want my Instagram platform to feel like. I don't want to feel like, you know, I can't be bothered to be here. Right. When you look at my little circle with the ring around it, I want you to see that I have some stories for you. I want you to see that I have some new reels since you last came to see me. I want you to come click on my page and be like, what is. What does Steph got to say? Like, I respect her. Her leadership in online business. You know, how can I learn from her? And so that is what I'm focused on for these next 100 days. And it has completely shifted how I view social media in 2025. I'm really thinking about the lurkers. I'm really having. I'm choosing to have the thought. People are watching. I've talked about launch magic on the podcast before, which is basically when you're doing a launch and you're selling something, and you keep thinking, nobody's coming, nobody's coming, and then suddenly someone comes out of the woodwork, and you're like, what the. Where did that person come from? Yeah, that's launch magic. And you can't measure it. You can't. I know you want to. I know you want to know. Well, oh, well, you know, it should be getting this many saves or this many share. No. Mm. Mm. It's just not how it works. I've been telling my clients that sales is part art and part science. Y'all are trying to a hundred percent science equation, this math equation, and that's just not it. 50% of this is art, and the art is. It's arty. It's, you know, it's a little bit more slippery. It's got a little bit of magic. It's got a Little bit of sparkle. It's a person seeing you watching your stuff, never talking to you and buying something, booking a call with you out of nowhere. And they were. They were watching and you didn't know it. And there was nothing to measure because you're not able to watch them watching you. But that doesn't mean that they're not right. So if you're asking me the question, is social media worth my time in 2025, my answer is if you are trying to be a thought leader, if you're trying to be a voice in your industry, social media is not optional. Your thought leadership is certainly not optional. And social media is a great place to showcase your thought leadership. And if you choose to abdicate that opportunity, I think you're missing out on an opportunity to show people the way that you lead and to show people that you have the courage to show up day in and day out again. You don't have to spend a lot of time, but that you have the courage to do that and that you are on your own. Like, how cool. In the year 2025, we all like, you know, like your pulpit, like the pulpit in the. In the town square from the 1800s where one guy would get to get on the box and say his piece. We all have a pulpit. You have an opportunity to have your own stage. You're gonna just walk by because it's scary to get up there because nobody's clapping, because they're not clapping loud enough for you. No way. You're going to get up there on your pulpit and you're going to say what needs to be said, and you're going to trust that the crowd is coming. So, my friends, I hope that is helpful for you. Those are my thoughts on social media in 2025. I hope you'll come. Follow the journey. I'm at. Hey, Steph Crowder. I will update you. I have a few people who've been like, this is the beauty of leadership, guys. I've had a few of my followers jump in and say, I'm going to do this, too. This is a great idea. I'm inspired. And that to me, it's worth everything that's worth, you know, I only need my people to resonate with what I'm posting. I don't need the whole wide world to care. I don't. It'd be great. Sure. External validation feels lovely. I'm not saying that it doesn't. But what matters most is reaching the people who are truly my people who are going to work with me. And hire me as their coach. That's what it's all about, so don't get it twisted. All right, my friends, I hope it's been helpful. I hope to see you over on Instagram. And until next week, I'm wishing you the courage and the clarity to go after what you love.